S/R 4, Karina Juarez

S/R 4: “From Screen to Screen: Students’ Use of Popular Culture Genres in Multimodal Writing Assignments”.

Karina Juarez, 08/05/18

Williams, Bronwyn T. “From Screen to Screen: Students' Use of Popular Culture Genres in Multimodal Writing Assignments.” Computers and Composition, vol. 34, 11 Oct. 2014, pp. 110–121. Science Direct, www-sciencedirect- com.ezhost.utrgv.edu/science/article/pii/S8755461514000656.

SUMMARY:

This article, by Brownyn T. Williams, explores, through student interviews and textual analysis, how student responses to multimodal assignments in college writing courses draw on popular culture genres, both explicitly and implicitly, in ways that students find unremarkable, but of which their instructors are often unaware.  Williams argues that what has gone largely unexamined in the production of multimodal composition assignments is how “the influence of popular culture influences students’ conceptions of and approaches to composing digital video and image assignments” (111).  Students’ use of popular culture genres as a rhetorical and semiotic resource for their course work can result in texts that are creative and engaging.  According to Williams, a number of theorists have argued that, “genre is more productively perceived as the result of social actions and relationships that are mediated through particular texts; consequently, genre simultaneously shapes social relationships and actions that are enacted through rhetoric and is highly contextual” (113).  Digital media technologies are enabling students to perform their identities, as writers, for multiple rhetorical contexts and audiences.  Students are utilizing their knowledge of digital technologies, referred to in this article as “antecedent knowledge” to compose because their instructors are, in, some cases, expecting them to compose for a YouTube video, or in a genre that, somehow, involves digital tools.  Williams argues that when students use their existing knowledge to produce a digital text, the results may not precisely be what their instructor expects.  In order to understand how students use their “antecedent knowledge” of popular genres (such as YouTube videos or television programs) to compose, Williams studies the composing process of students and asks them to reflect on their writing and any challenges they may have experienced in completing their assignments.  For example, a student named Marie, researched the literacy practices of football fans, and, as an English major, she had minimal experience in composing multimodal texts.  As she began working through ideas for her project, she decided that she wanted to argue that being in fantasy football league changed how fans watched games as they paid more attention to how individual players performed and earned fantasy points than they did about whether a team won or lost.  She reflected, “If I blended together what the video games look like and sports broadcasts, with the fantasy football way of seeing a game, I could make it change the way you see all of them at once” (117).  At the same time that Marie was using content and conventions from different genres of sportscast and video games, she was conscious of setting up her video in a way that used conventions from remixing videos of title cards, juxtaposing images and overlapping sound.  In the case of another student, named Alan, his project focused on anonymity online and how it influenced the behavior of individuals in online forums, and he created a machinima, (a method of making animated film software similar to that designed for making video and computer games) using one of the Call of Duty games.  The user was led through each level by one of characters in the game acting as a guide and as anonymity increased, each level became increasingly chaotic until a point where there was complete anonymity and bullets whizzed about and no rules existed (118).  As a result of this study, the authors conclude that teachers should help students to appropriate their knowledge of popular genres to fulfill expectations for a course that requires digital composing.

RESPONSE:

This article was insightful for me to read because if I were a teacher, which I’m not, I would probably not be reluctant in assigning students to produce a YouTube video.  It seems simple enough to assign this type of work, but this type of work asks students to draw on their existing knowledge to compose a text that is meaningful and relevant.  There is quote I found in this article that made me think critically about how multimodal assignments are requiring students to perform their identities for an audience.  Students’ use of popular culture genres as a rhetorical and semiotic resource for their course work can result in texts that are creative and engaging.  According to Williams, a number of theorists have argued that, “genre is more productively perceived as the result of social actions and relationships that are mediated through particular texts; consequently, genre simultaneously shapes social relationships and actions that are enacted through rhetoric and is highly contextual” (113).  What this quotation implies for me is that there is a relationship between genre and social actions that students engage with in their daily lives such as watching YouTube videos, uploading pictures and updating their Facebook statuses, composing a Snapchat story, watching t.v., or socializing with their friends.  Students are, like other persons, social individuals, and their writing cannot exist within the context of their minds and their teachers’ expectations.  Students draw on their knowledge of genres that are familiar to them to compose and this results in the creation of an audience and also enacts a specialized rhetorical discourse---one that is unique to digital composing.  To clarify what I mean by a “specialized rhetorical discourse”, I mean to suggest that a digital composition is different from a traditional, written composition, because both of these assignments ask them to, obviously, draw on appropriate rhetorical conventions of writing.  However, digital composition allows for more flexibility because there are multiple ways that students can draw on their existing knowledge to compose a product that is rhetorically meaningful and engaging.  In terms of digital identity, I believe that there is not a dichotomy between the identities of a student in real life and the persona that they project behind a screen, or, in this case, behind digital composing technologies.  When students are asked to compose for a class, using digital technologies, there are expectations that need to be fulfilled, so a student will not be, deliberately, projecting a false persona.  Rather, students’ digital identities, in the production of multimodal texts, are influenced by their knowledge of conventions of discourse, rhetoric, genre, context, and appropriateness.  Students’ digital identities are, inevitably, interconnected to their knowledge of the worlds in which they live and engage with on a daily basis.

QUOTATIONS:

“The symbolic landscape we have constructed for us to live in is precisely that which most fits us and the others with whom we share it.  When we travel to new communicative domains, we construct our perception with the forms we know” (113).

“Rather than being taught genre as a set of forms to be mastered, the recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition has argued for teaching students that genres work as networks that interact with each other and are employed most effectively in response to particular rhetorical contexts” (113).

“Rather than assuming that the only learning worth happening in school takes place when the base influences encountered outside the classroom are turned into the gold of academic literacy and texts, we should instead approach all of the literacy practices, in the classroom and out, as connected” (119).