I am a dreamer—literally, an Inception-like dreamer—as in my mind is a mess when I sleep.
Last night it was the same dream I’ve had all quarter: I’m teaching, my students are acting like little demons, and I walk to stand behind the computer.
Every time I stand behind the computer. Let’s decode this: the computer symbolizes either comfort or protection.
But I don’t believe that for a minute (just as I don’t believe dreaming of pirates and orange lizards means I’m repressing thoughts of rebellion and traveling.)
The computer—or any technology for the purpose of this post—does not comfort me. It does not offer protection. It is simply another device I must master to keep up with the times and changing composition classroom. But I do not care if I have to master it or learn how to make musical mash-ups to supplement my FlipCam video.
Instead, I worry about my students, my group of dream-demon students.
Students can take comfort that the teacher is the only person reading their work, their work that is protected behind their essay folders. Their education, in this way, is a private endeavor, a relationship between their brain, Microsoft Word, and their teacher’s eyeballs. With multimodal composing, however, the student participates in an open relationship whether they like it or not.
We actively work to convince our students that they are not writing solely for the teacher, right? I would like to challenge that idea. Students will always be writing for a specific audience, long after they graduate. If students are aware of the various discourses and audiences, does it matter that their research papers on technological implications of the 21st century are not written for the rest of the world to read? Likewise, do their multimodal projects need to be created in groups or face the critiques of their peers?
Chapter nine in Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers focuses on response and the peer-review of projects. Like most of the chapters we have read for this class, there is an assumption that many projects will be group work. Now teachers are supposed to add peer-review sessions where a student’s work is displayed for the entire class to critique.
Kara Poe Alexander addresses a problem some instructors might have with peer review: “The usual concerns that accrue to such an understanding [that teachers assign the final grade] may be exacerbated, moreover, by the fact that students may have little experience with teachers’ expectations for projects involving audio, video, and other modalitites beyond the alphabetic” (124).
Right. So no one in the class knows what actually matters, except for the teacher who is giving the grade. Even if the teacher makes it explicitly known what is getting evaluated, students still might not get it. They might not care about others’ projects. They might not speak up because they don’t want to hurt feelings. They might speak up and hurt feelings.
Peer review is nice because there are more sets of eyes on a project than only the teacher’s. But it just doesn’t work as well as individual conferences with the person who is actually assigning the grade, the one who knows exactly what is at stake.
Projects, in this case, might not be created for the world outside of the classroom. Is there something wrong with this? Why can’t students be private about their scholarship? I think they realize someday they will have to create and compose for other audiences, so why must we force them to do it now?
I like the protection and comfort of a student-teacher relationship when it comes to my writing. I think I might feel the same way if I was composing in different modalities. Why can’t students simply learn in the classroom without worrying about their peers?
Below are two projects my students created for their nontraditional essay assignment. Both said I could share with you—my fellow graduate students—but neither wanted me to show the rest of the class.
How would their projects have changed if peer review had been required?
I've always had a policy in my syllabus that states that all writing students do for my class is public. I don't try and pretend that I'm not the audience for my students' texts, but I do stress that I am a representative of a particular community. The texts I have them write our genres intended for public distribution. I don't see the value of assigning genres of personal communication. While these texts are intended for a certain audience, I think it is important for students to keep in mind that they might not always get the audience they intended (something many of them should keep in mind when they write things on their facebook/myspace/twitter accounts.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do value the one-on-one conference with students, I have often found that the class critiques are far more beneficial for students that conferences. On my syllabus I state that students should expect to have their essays critiqued in front of the whole class. For every peer review day, before students do their individual groups, I put one or two essays on the screen and the entire class critiques them. So far, I have actually found that students are more willing to be critical and honest in these class critiques than they are with their small group critiques, perhaps because I first remove students' names fromt the essays. I think if students really know that I am not their only audience and that the entire class really is going to read their essay, they approach the writing differently. Much of the value in a Creative Writing workshop is the fact that you workshop your work and get feedback from a group of people. Composition and creativity are both involved in the peer review for multimodal projects as well, and whether students feel comfortable or not having their work critiqued in front of everyone, there is a lot of value in it. I don't want my students to feel comfortable. They seem to learn better when they are forced to come out of their comfort zone, which includes having their compositions available for public viewing, even if that public is just that class.
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