Presentation Title
Digital Literacy & Rhetorical Listening in the First Year Composition Classroom
Abstract
Before entering the first year composition classroom many students have already engaged with and created sophisticated multimodal texts. Digital platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are widely used and provide a rich window into the composing practices of new college students. The field of rhetoric and composition has explored the intricacies of these practices and their potential utility in the first year composition classroom. It is my intention to provide a potential structure for the recognition and transfer of home-literacy into the classroom. Additionally, I want to propose that these practices could be made more compassionate in the context of first-year composition.
Joseph Harris’ Rewriting: How to do Things with Texts provides an interesting framework in which to situate the work of social media composition. Although my students seem to intuit the work of rewriting on Instagram and Twitter, this work becomes somehow strange and daunting in the context of the first year composition classroom. By applying the lens of Rewriting, which is an academically oriented text that advocates specific “moves,” composition instructors can demonstrate the complexity of digital literacy in a way that encourages further development of these rhetorical skills.
What is so often missing from the landscape of the internet is empathy. While my work with Harris is primarily concerned with transferring existing writing practices into the first year composition classroom, I am also invested in exploring what could be transferred out. Here, Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, and Whiteness becomes a useful tool. Ratcliffe advocates for the elevation of listening within the field of rhetoric and composition as both “a trope for interpretive invention and a tool for cross-cultural conduct” (1). I argue that rhetorical listening acts as an compassionate extension or underpinning to rewriting.
Primary Faculty Mentor Name
Jean Besette
Status
Graduate
Student College
College of Arts and Sciences
Program/Major
English
Primary Research Category
Arts & Humanities
Digital Literacy & Rhetorical Listening in the First Year Composition Classroom
Before entering the first year composition classroom many students have already engaged with and created sophisticated multimodal texts. Digital platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are widely used and provide a rich window into the composing practices of new college students. The field of rhetoric and composition has explored the intricacies of these practices and their potential utility in the first year composition classroom. It is my intention to provide a potential structure for the recognition and transfer of home-literacy into the classroom. Additionally, I want to propose that these practices could be made more compassionate in the context of first-year composition.
Joseph Harris’ Rewriting: How to do Things with Texts provides an interesting framework in which to situate the work of social media composition. Although my students seem to intuit the work of rewriting on Instagram and Twitter, this work becomes somehow strange and daunting in the context of the first year composition classroom. By applying the lens of Rewriting, which is an academically oriented text that advocates specific “moves,” composition instructors can demonstrate the complexity of digital literacy in a way that encourages further development of these rhetorical skills.
What is so often missing from the landscape of the internet is empathy. While my work with Harris is primarily concerned with transferring existing writing practices into the first year composition classroom, I am also invested in exploring what could be transferred out. Here, Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, and Whiteness becomes a useful tool. Ratcliffe advocates for the elevation of listening within the field of rhetoric and composition as both “a trope for interpretive invention and a tool for cross-cultural conduct” (1). I argue that rhetorical listening acts as an compassionate extension or underpinning to rewriting.