It strikes me today that so much of our conversation revolved around the concept of intellectual depth. If we look at literate products or products that work to convey meaning on a continuum--say the move from a children's book to a Foucault text--more images results in less intellectual depth, or, as we talked about this morning, the attention needed to engage and understand the meaning being conveyed is greater with the alphabetic only text. So, where does that place our multi-modal compositions in a dsicipline that has centered itself heart and soul on privileging literacy. Part of the prejudice towards the emphasis on multi-modality is the fear that it won't result in intellectual depth from our students or even the projects of our faculty. However, we are talking out of both sides of our mouths. It is difficult to say a famous painting or sculpture or film doesn't have intellectual depth. Also, although the specialized language, another sign of disciplinary legitimacy, is in the process of being developed or gathered from other appropriate disciplines (such as the vocabulary of film), emerging practitioners of multimodality are just becoming familiar with it. It seems the rhetorical goals for convincing the skeptical is to show that the multi-modal projects being produced by students and faculty are intellectually complex and have intellectual depth and to work towards using a common language to talk about and persuade others about the type of communication work that multi-modal presentations and presenters can do.
Hope this is coherent. Just felt a need to convey a gut response from the morning's discussion immediately.
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2 comments:
You put your finger on something I've been thinking about since our conversation this morning. Maybe it's more like a question: why do we need to say that print texts and multi-modal ones are equally rigorous, require a comparable amount of focus in order to consume or produce? Our terms of valuation are riddled with anxiety. If it's not rigorous, intellectual, etc., then it's not legitimate. I'm interested in putting pressure on these ways of describing textual labor. The labor involved in producing and consuming text types is different. Our language of valuation has to change in order to reflect this difference. I understand the reasons for defending the rigor of multi-modal composing--especially political reasons that allow us to make a case to skeptical colleagues in order to change curricula, get resources, and so forth. Still, changing what counts as composing requires change in how we talk about the value of different forms of composing. But, how? I know there's work out there on this topic...I need to read it.
Pleasure often does get left out--the pleasure of composing and the pleasure of the audience benefiting from the project. Pleasure isn't generally considered important, is it? Something we should reconsider. Maybe we would see more of our students experiencing "flow," to use Csíkszentmihályi's term, if we could place some value on pleasure as well as rigor. However, as you alluded, rigor seems more arguable to the power players and decision-makers. Today was interesting in that it really combined elements of pleasure and rigor--exhausting but exciting. How to create that tension in our composition classrooms on a regular basis-- huhnmm.
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