digital digs

thinking programmatically about first-year composition

And the continuing saga of revising our fyc program...

So here is a question/thought experiment/hypothesis. If you were to take all your institution's graduates over the last decade and categorize them in the following ways:

• high school GPA
• SAT verbal score
• AP place-outs of some or all of your FYC program
• Transfers who took FYC elsewhere
• Grade in your FYC program
• Grade in upper-division writing intensive courses in their major.

Would you guess that you would discover the following? That HS GPA and SAT verbal scores would roughly match? That these scores would match performance in your FYC program, as well as performance in later writing intensive courses? And, that this would hold true for transfers and those who placed out of your program?

IF this turned out to be the case, it would seem to suggest the following. That IF your goal is to "prepare" students for college writing, it doesn't really matter what kind of FYC experience you have. When you look at a broad number of students what you find is that students who perform well continue to perform well, regardless of the instructional method or content.

Now this is just a hypothesis, so maybe if you actually looked at your institution's numbers you'd see this isn't true, but it makes perfect sense that it would. Why?

civic engagement and public pedagogy

A couple of pieces from Howard Rheingold on this subject: a New Media Consortium presentation from Second Life and an article from a forthcoming MIT Press book, Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. I've written about public pedagogy here before. The issue of civic engagement is closely related, at least in the ways we've come to talk about the democratic, participatory potential of the media networks. The video offers a broad overview of the relationship between communication technologies and collective action. The article looks in a practical way at how participatory media might be integrated into literacy education. As such, they are quite different, but they both deal with the central theme of how technologies offer opportunities or possibilities for collective action.

So there are really two questions here. One is how do we teach students media literacy. Reports about media revolutions and millennials often start with talking about how much young people know and do. However, in my experience, these trends represent only a small percentage of students. As has long been the case, one can find a small percentage of students who are engaged and literate. The question has always been what to do about the other students.

The second question then shifts the focus to civic engagement. Once you have students with media literacy, how does that literacy become a tool that supports student entry into a public sphere? As Rheingold suggests in his article, civic engagement begins with concerns that students can self-identify. Courses can introduce students to a variety of issues, and students can discover other interests in their communities, in the media, and so on, but students ultimately need to claim an interest. This problem seems similar to the problem of literacy, and maybe they are the same problem. I don't generally encounter students with "interests," not even with interests as fans.