Teacher Training and Technology

For our October 22nd meeting, I've been reading about training teachers to teach multimodal composition. Here's a summary and analysis of what I've found:

1. Teachers need to believe that new media rhetoric is important, or this will fail.

"Technology is either boring or frightening to most humanists; many teachers of English composition feel it antithetical to their primary concerns and many believe it should not be allowed to take up valuable scholarly time or the attention that could be best put to use in the teaching or the study of literacy" - Cynthia Selfe
“Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention.” CCC 50(1999): 412.

Phrases I remember from the persuasive brochure training: "there's really not much you can teach with this," "it's easier to tell what doesn't work than what does," "it's nice to have an easy assignment right at the end"

Phrases that circulate around the carrels about the persuasive brochure: "I don't really teach this," "it sort of feels like a throwaway assignment," "I'm not sure how the brochure is useful," "I'm glad I don't have to do this assignment myself," etc.

If graduate student instructors aren't sold on the idea that new media rhetoric is important for our students, and, to a certain point, our responsibility to teach, any training will ultimately fail or be less effective.

Other sources:

• Kellner, Douglas, and Jeff Share. "Critical media literacy is not an option." Learning Inquiry (2007): 59-69. Print.
• Westbrook, Steve. "Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear: Impediments to Multimedia Production." College English 68.5 (2006): 457-80. Print.
• Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

2. Infrastructural Support, including Training and Technology

"Instructor training and student training—in more than just the technical skills and access required to participate in the courses—are critical to institutional success, especially in the early years of hybrid programs. Although many instructors use email and a course message board to support their on-site courses, most need thoughtful instruction themselves about how to facilitate productive discussion via these course technologies....Institutional success with such programs depends, therefore, on prioritizing and institutionalizing support for the whole institution—not just one subgroup (students, faculty, or administrators). Flexible institutional support is key so that faculty, students, and administrators are able to share resources and information to manage and reflect on the new variables that would no doubt be introduced by such an explicit shift in course and program design. In the absence of such a flexible and dynamic network of support, the outcome is likely to be either stifled (too much institutional control over communication, methods, and resources) or left to a “silent revolution” of inadvertent educational reform and policy change—neither of which are long-term predictors of success" -Catherine Gouge, "Conversation at a Crucial Moment: Hybrid Courses and the Future of Writing Programs." College English 71.4 (2009): 357-8.

Training

A. Training in theory
Countless sources do not dismay that our jobs are disappearing because of technology; what the teacher has to offer, regardless of the varying technical expertise of the students, is the rhetoric of new media, the theory behind it, an understanding of how to use new media in a conscious, intentional, and critically-informed way.

How could this training occur for English 150 instructors?
The August training seminar can provide a model for theoretical training:

• Reading for the instructors
• "Viewing" at least 2/3 lesson plans on how to teach it to students
• Providing additional resources for the teachers to draw upon
• Have one, focused theoretical approach, but show an awareness of other approaches and options.
  

One hour or two hours during WIM is not enough, especially since the majority of English 150 instructors have little or no exposure to concepts of new media rhetoric.

B. Training in the practical
In a 2009 College English, Catherine Gouge, building on Todd Taylor, claims that we must "Invest heavily in hands-on instructor training" (344).

-Goal 1 -- to be able to teach particular programs to the students, like Powerpoint, Flash, etc. This seems to be less important than Goal 2, especially as programs are constantly changing and it's debatable whether or not it's the writing instructor's responsibility to teach these programs (though Simmons and Grabill argue in CCC that it is our responsibility). Regardless, there is the sense that even if an instructor is not going to teach a program, they should have at least some understanding of it. For example, if one of my students is having trouble getting proper formatting in Microsoft Word, then I show them how to fix it.

-Goal 2 -- provide hands-on instructor training because you only truly understand something (and the theory behind it) when you've done it yourself. In a similar vein, you can only teach what you know how to do yourself. We would never let someone teach writing who had only read writing and studied the theories of writing pedagogy; in the same way, it's rather absurd to have a teacher instruct students on new media rhetoric and writing when he/she has never done this sort of writing before.

Technology
As Daniel Anderson argues, it's very possible to transition into technology use, to have a "low bridge to high benefits" which take advantage of technologies students already know and have access to.

Many free technologies are available online. These technologies are often easy to use and yet still powerful. Other technologies are available on campus computers; most have only the lower-end programs, but the Humanities Learning Resource Center and the Multimedia Lab in the HBLL have higher end technologies, the problem being that they would not have the capacity to support all of our students.

Creative Commons images prevent copyright problems for students -- for example, Flickr has an option to search only images that are copyright free; millions of images are already available in this form.

Most students have access to digital cameras, if only on their cell phones. This is still not true of video cameras.

Other sources:

• Anderson, Daniel. “The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation.” Computers and Composition 25.1 (2008): 40-60. Print.
• Atkins, Anthony T. "Writing/Teachers and Digital Technologies: Technology/Teacher Training."
• DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 14-44. Print.
• Simmons, W. Michele and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Toward a Civic Rhetoric for Technologically and Scientifically Complex Places: Invention, Performance, and Participation.” CCC 58.3 (2007): 419-48. Print.

3. Teaching Assessment

Most instructors don't feel comfortable grading the persuasive brochure at this point, and many feel that trying to grade anything that incorporates visuals is too subjective.

To borrow a phrase from a syllabus of Brian Jackson, just as with grading traditional writing, it is subjective but not arbitrary.

Film, visual arts, and comms professors grade visuals all the time; our instructors just aren't currently prepared to do so. Many sources have proposed grading schemes for new media rhetoric; they just need to be drawn on, and instructors need to be given training.

In addition to rubrics, instructors need to be given new media rhetoric grading practice and grade norming.

Currently, with the persuasive brochure, an instructor receives no training for grading, and then each semester only grades five brochures, for a grand total of 20 brochures over 4 semesters. The same instructor grades 60 full-fledged papers a semester, thus solidifying the training they have received in regards to writing assessment. It's not reasonable to think that an instructor would gain the same amount of experience for new media assessment, but more assessment training and experience is needed for them to be able to do their jobs.

4. Curricular changes needed for graduate (and undergraduate) English classes

Disclaimer: I don't mean to disturb the peaceful waters with this fifth item, especially as I've loved all of my graduate classes and feel like I've received a great education from all of you who have been my professors.

"The focus on the digital in most graduate programs, if it exists at all, continues to be the single technology course, though it is more than possible to foreground the use and application of technology to all aspects of graduate curricula in rhetoric and composition....functional, critical, and rhetorical training in multimodal teaching and research must span all aspects of professional development within the graduate curriculum, from the beginning for one's graduate career to the job search and first position as a tenure-track faculty member." -Meredith Graupner, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Kristine Blair
"Remediating Knowledge-Making Spaces in the Graduate Curriculum: Developing and Sustaining Multimodal Teaching and Research." Computers and Composition 26 (2009): 14.

Currently, most of BYU's English graduate and undergraduate classes unintentionally devalue new media writing and rhetoric by either ignoring them entirely or by only doing critical analysis without production, and at that during only 1 or 2 days of the semester.

Other sources:
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Re-designing Graduate Education in Composition and Rhetoric: The Use of Remix as Concept, Material, and Method." Computers and Composition 26 (2009): 4-12.