+++++++ COURSE PORTFOLIO +++++++
American Literary Traditions
/ Randy Bass
Learning: A Narrative Analysis
Evidence of Learning in Projects
There are only a handful of projects, in any given hypertext assignment,
that are excellent in every way. These few projects have substantial and
interesting analyses, while also taking full advantage of the hypertext
form, playing with linking and multidirectionality, making meaningful connections
to outside sources and engaging connections to their peers' work. Similarly,
I believe there are few, (probably even fewer) really weak projects, that
lack both substance and are underachieving in terms of electronic rhetorical
possibilities.
Most of the projects for any of the undergraduate courses I have taught
are somewhere in between, and while needing improvement in some ways show
some characteristics that I find exciting and promising in opening up matters
of narrative and rhetorical form. Therefore, as I browse through any of
these hypertext projects I see things that are both pleasing and bothersome.
For the most part though, I believe the areas that indicate some "opening
up" of understanding are largely endemic to the medium; the areas that
need revision or an increase in rigor or thought could be largely addressed
with more time and a more deliberate, multi-stage authoring process that
included peer and instructor critiques.
Overall, though I offer this caution: that one must read the hypertext
projects with a playful and open mind, looking for indications of learning
while not reacting too strongly to errors and weaknesses that would be
conspicuous in a traditional print paper. All things cannot be taught at
the same time. And, as I have stated in the argument
section, I chose "paradigm" over certain other traditional emphases
in this course. Below, I have tried to elaborate on some of the promising
things I see in the projects, and located some student examples that I
think illustrate particular learning goals.
Focus on Language and Close Reading
As with any English teacher, one of my primary goals in a course is
to get students to pay attention to language. "Close reading" has a lot
of connotations in the field; for me it is at the least the act of attending
to certain words as more important than others. Moreover, it is the habit
of reading and thinking that sees words as markers of larger themes, and
optimally, markers of social discourse. An important first step to this
kind of reading, I believe, is for students to see language "in relief"
and no longer flat. Electronic tools--with the cability to highlight words,
play with fonts and colors, and turn words and phrases into links to other
dimensions of discussion--provide students with resources for recasting
the language of literary texts in relief. At times the new texture is too
busy or confusing; nonetheless, I am pleased for now just to see students
making use of electronic tools to make vivid their developing sense of
how language is working in these texts.
Playing with Rhetoric and Form
Richard Lanham argues that electronic writing marks a return to rhetoric.
Writing in electronic spaces allows meaning to be made through more than
words, as it is also a very visual medium. To play with font sizes, page
design, mixtures of graphics and text is to engage with text at a graphical
as well as rhetorical level. As he says, "pixeled print" returns the "arts
and letters" to that "characteristic oscillation between looking AT symbols
and looking THROUGH them..." In many ways, the capacity to look AT and
THROUGH is what characterizes critical reading. Therefore, the more that
students engage in some kind of playfulness with form in these interpretive
hypertext projects, the more I believe they are learning to look AT and
THROUGH the texts they are reading. When, as in especially the first three
examples below, students take passages from novels and start making different
words different colors, or making what they consider the pivotal phrase
in a passage a larger font than others, they are representing a textured
reading of the text. However, abhorrent these papers may be to the traditionalist,
I find this kind of activity--as ONE component of engagement with literature
and analysis--an extremely healthy and lively way to do something fairly
sophisticated in intent, if rather novice and playful in execution.
Dialogue and Connections
Strong peer links
One of the most promising indications in the course was the use of
hypertext for students to record linkages between their work and their
peers. For both assignments, students were required to read peer projects
and create links to related work in such a way that they were engaging
with that work and not merely linking to it. By far, within this component
of the projects, the most exciting moments were where students linked to
each other in a two way dialogue. It is very satisfying whenever students
are engaging each others' writing, but it was most exciting when the link
went both ways. In the final project, I had asked students who linked to
a project to email that person so that they have the opportunity to link
back. This becomes, of course, a chicken and egg problem of timing. Perhaps
the solution is a two stage linking process that would insure bi-directional
links in the second round. Ideally, students who would be cross-linking
would be altering and revising their argument as a result. However there
are some examples of bi-drectional links such as the example of Morris/Bednarz
and Kombrink/Catanzano.
An example of a strong link where a peer's argument is referenced AND engaged
is Bednarz/Hill.
There are many strong peer links of this kind, as well as many weaker links
with facile connections. Again this is a function of time. This is an area
I will emphasize (and evaluate) even more strenuously next time. However,
being rigorous with peer link engagement requires that things run smoothly
with mounteing papers, so they are all up in time for students to read
each others' work. Another example where a powerful learning strategy is
dependent on technical cooperation.
-
example
#1
-
example
#2
-
example
#3
Links between present and past work
Also satisfying in the area of linking were the occasions where students
linked back to their earlier projects. This is another area that I hope
to emphasize and encourage more of in the future. In numerous cases, students
either created explicit electronic and rhetorical links in their final
project back to their earlier work on Moby-Dick, or created links from
their final project back to the earlier projects of their peers. In either
case, I believe that the ability to see each others' work and to tangibly
link to it creates an intellectually healthy atmosphere of continuity across
assignments, communicating to students that each assignment can and should
be a building up of knowledge and ongoing development of their thinking
rather than the isolated and episodic fulfillment of one assignment after
another.
Links to critical and external resources
Simultaneously the strength and bane of writing on the Internet is
the ability to make connections from one's work to other electronic texts.
This is an extremely positive capability I try to work to every possible
advantage, from the early Beloved
assignment on "Holocaust, Slavery, and the Atomic Bomb," to encouraging
them to link their project arguments to outside critical and external resources.
Throughout the semester I talk about the "rhetoric of the link"--of seeing
that there is an evidentiay weight to a link in the same way as quoting
a piece of text from another source. I encourage them construct a context
for a link in the rhetoric of their writing, explaining to the reader why
they are creating the link and what the impact is on the present argument.
Sometimes this occurs and other times not. At its worst, a student will
make an allusion, for example, to the Vietnam War, with a link to a site
on the Vietnam War, without any reference whatsoever to the content of
that site or why the link is enhancing over the mere reference. At its
best, an external link is both like an intertextual reference and citation,
enhancing the argument and providing the reader an opportunity to go directly
to the source. As with other areas of concern, with more time to develop,
critique, and revise projects, facile links can be addressed, and a more
responsible rhetoric of linking can be applied.
Links to the Course Prospectus
Finally, one of the more satisfying occasions for linking to other
texts was when students, quite on their own, linked their argument (both
rhetorically and literally) to my Course
Prospectus. Because I had written the Course Prospectus to provide
a more explicit architecture for the governing ideas of the course, it
is reasonable that it would provide touchpoints for their analyses. It
might make sense in the future to have them develop simple hypertext papers
out of the Prospectus, linking to its themes and to each other. This kind
of exercise would be perhaps a natural extension of the Prospectus' intention,
by asking them to extend and connect their thinking about the texts to
the course's overall themes. Naturally, this the connection between overarching
themes and student work is at the center of all courses; but this process
could be more vivid for the class as a community and perhaps more accessible
for a higher percentage of students, if the connections between course
architecture and student work were made visible through linking and branching.
Web and Multiplicity
As I discuss in the "Intentions"
discussion within the Argument
section, it was my hope that that the Web could be used not only as
a resource for research, but as a metaphor for seeing literature as a constructed
object and a coherent structure with multiple contexts. In a variety of
ways, the Web--and its related ideas of inegration, multiplicity (and multiple
ways of making meaning), and relation to recursion and complexity--would
be a serviceable concept for students in their projects. In many ways,
and with varying levels of sophisitication, the projects from both semesters
bear this out.
Integration of Parts
The loftiest goal of the fall semester's hypertext projects was to create
a "radial" essay with multiple parts. In the case of the Moby-Dick assignment
it was five pages, for the final a minimum of three pages. The idea--especially
in Moby-Dick, was to begin with a central page and branch out in a hub
and spoke format. Each page had to stand alone and refer back to the center;
in the case of the final, all three pages had to relate to a central theme,
and ideally have cross linking among the pages. Someof the final projects
read much like traditional papers put on the Web with a minimal of linking.
This is very much a factor of time running out, as intelligent cross-linking
is often a layered later step in the construction process, I find. However,
some papers do have a sense of integration that show a different kind of
argumentative follow-through than a traditional paper's emphasis on depth.
I do not advocate one approach over another, but think that the "radial"
essay can force certain self-conscious strategies that are both expansive
and reinforcing of traditional skills. Below are two examples of papers
that I think demonstrate a significant level of integration throughout
the paper, with modest use of hypertext.
Multiple Ways of Meaning
One of the advantages, of course, of electronic writing is the ability
to organize and articulate in multiple directions and in multiple ways.
For example, in this portfolio, I am able to get at many different issues
and ideas from multiple directions. Writing then becomes overdetermined
in that one has to have a very total sense of argument and the architecture
of the argument in order to make it work with a multidimensional structure.
I think that is true of these hypertext projects as well. The capacity
of literature to make its meaning in an overdetermined way is not unrelated
to the capacity of electronic spaces to allow students to make their meaning
in multiple ways. Below are two examples of papers that in a particularly
vivid way construct their meaning in multiple ways.
Web as Metaphor
Finally, in both semesters there was a percentage of students for whom
the possible connections between between hypertext, complex narrative,
and the interplay of memory, culture and history were productively seen
in the context of Native American notions of storytelling, community, and
cosmology, at least as they are presented through Silko's writings. Below
are just two of many examples of students who--at whatever level of sophistication--see
these connections with a kind of wholeness. As I've argued throughout,
the strength of this vision may be more in the paradigmatic shift than
the analytical details; but it is immensely satisfying to me nonetheless.
cover * contexts
* argument * syllabus*
learning