Going Modal

I’m convinced of aurality’s pedagogical merit in any compositional academic context. Even just today, when talking to Tim and Rachel today about new media, I explained that I often have to use music as a compositional metaphor when lacking some other baseline shared experience with my students. The rationale here is to appeal to a different compositional environment, one that must be coherent in certain respects, constructed to have form and meaning understandable by other people. However, such approaches are rifle with peril. Not all students will understand every such approach, and therefore numerous should be considered. While I feel savvy enough using my music example, others may not roll off my tongue as well.

Cynthia Selfe defines her approach as “civic pluralism” (Response, 607), a reaching-out process that avoids privileging writing as a form of expression, extending its pedagogical value to a variety of peoples who may have been educated with different systems of privileged modalities. She’s right in noting not everybody writes to compose meaning, and cognition is inextricably linked in many respects to expression through a given medium. Modality molds expression.

Doug Hesse, in his response to Selfe’s essay, expresses concern over the teaching of multiple modalities in a writing context. He argues in favor of exploring these various modalities in a rhetoric class, noting that each has its own “best fit” (603) depending on the context. Hesse distinguishes writing as a subset of rhetoric, therefore treatable/teachable chiefly in the context of written language. He’s rightly worried about “stakeholders”: students need to learn how to compose through writing in a writing class; Hesse employs the analogy “If I am to teach German, noting the world’s economic drift…I decide instead to teach Chinese, I shouldn’t be surprised if some stakeholder’s object” (603). He sees Selfe’s aim as “nothing short of calling for an expansive redefinition…of composition as rhetoric” (603). On this point, though, I’m not sure exactly what Hesse is concerned about. He himself points out that writing is a subset of rhetoric, and writing composition necessarily entails the study of rhetoric. So how is composition being “redefined”, as such?

To me, there’s nothing wrong with advocating attention to multiple modalities. True, incorporating a systematic classroom treatment of these modalities is daunting, but certainly not impossible to undertake. No single instructor could cover every modality, regardless. It’s therefore our job to at least acknowledge these different means of composition. Even simply juxtaposing writing with some other modality can serve to highlight the strengths and uses of both. Perhaps, as Hesse suggests, Selfe advocates for a system-wide redefinition of composition teaching. However, such a change would necessarily have to cross departments, cross campuses, and intellectual boundaries. She herself admits, “I try to design my composition classes as places where students begin the complex process of learning how to make use of all sorts of design resources” (Response 606). This way, she effectively raises the stakes for students, not as much teaching them the specifics of modal rhetorical sovereignty (whew!), but instead how to recognize and possibly learn how to take advantage of that freedom (cf. “The Movement of Air 618).

But even when teaching someone how to fish, somebody has to cast a line, and it’s no good to send students out unprepared. The specifics of particular modalities must be taught in some respect, and it seems highly unlikely that an interdepartmental alliance would form to bridge the gap between compositional strategies. Selfe insists, “The time that students spend in composition classrooms is altogether too short” (“The Movement of Air” 643). Of course we don’t have enough time, and therefore Hesse’s critique stands on this point especially. Not only do we not have the time, but we also don’t have a specialized knowledge of all modalities in question. We have to ask ourselves, how do we prioritize modalities? Setting such priorities, especially when considering a pluralistic student audience, is not a simple matter to say the least.

But why do we have to limit composition to the composition classroom? If we are indeed Gatekeepers, why can’t we approach Selfe’s ideas in a forward-looking, introductory manner? College composition can take many forms, and writing should of course maintain institutional priority if nothing else for the sake of our student’s survival the academy. Hesse worries that stakeholders (namely students) need to have maximum investment in a “high conceptual level rather than an accretive one” in order to effectively approach multi-modal learning (603). Again, this notion calls into question the matter of modal specialization: we’re writing teachers, and maybe we’re familiar with some of these other modes, but not necessarily enough to bridge the conceptual gap between these modes for students.

But where we lack the specialized knowledge to help us teach other modalities, other teachers can help fill these gaps in many respects. Since nearly all college courses demand some sort of work production—written or otherwise—aren’t we all composition instructors in a sense? If English 101 and other intro writing courses maintained a sense of forward-looking self-awareness, we’d still get to teach writing while paying appropriate critical attention to other expressive modes. Students need to learn how to be effective rhetorical agents before they can master any given modality.

Despite clear hazards to her approach, Selfe’s appeal to understanding the pertinence of other compositional modalities trumps many of Hesse’s concerns, being the most important point of her argument. While his apprehensions are valid and applicable, little is lost through writing instructors teaching students how to approach/understand/recognize other modalities, even if those teachers can’t function within those modalities themselves.