New literacy

This morning, Cindy asked us to consider the kinds of literacies that students would have to have in order to be successful makers of meaning in the early 21st century. I think my favorite thing to emerge from this discussion was the notion that we can no longer think of literacy practices in our classes as analysis OR production, reading OR writing, that students will need to think about (and be taught) both simultaneously as one literacy practice. This is an issue that has been near and dear to my heart for my entire teaching career. I have to believe that often, our students think we're bonkers when we say, "This is a literature class," or "This is a writing class," or when we make such an issue out of the fact that we're going to do both. Most of the time, I think they get it. Yet, we shift them blame on them for separating the acts. I'm guilty of it myself.

The DMP (and its earlier shapes--The Apple Project and Computers in Composition and Literature) at Ohio State has always been about production--asking students to use technology to make things. In 2002, when the mission of the DMP began to shift toward digital media studies and multimodal composing, it was a necessity to foreground the "production" for one simple reason: the technology that would allow teachers to imagine a course where there was no separation between analysis and production wasn't a reality. We taught a lot of video analysis, for example, but we didn't know how to make video production work in our classes. I wonder now, though, if we are at a moment when we need to stop making these distinctions and assuming that the work we do will always involve analysis and production in tandem.