Week two response

I found the least theoretical and, thus, most potentially relevant of these four articles to be "Writing with Video" by Lovett, et al. "Least theoretical," however, does not translate directly to most relevant professionally because of the limitations of funding and technology access. Teaching unmotivated "retrieval" (failed) freshmen for the first time in my career, I can see tremendous potential application of the concepts and practices outlined in this article. These students, having quite low reading levels, have a natural disinclination to commit their poor writing skills and damaged egos to the written page yet they are rather adept at manipulating various technologies, such as texting devices, the internet, and MP3 players. They also have a strong awareness of social issues that affect them. Given access to the technology, I would happily design similar assignments for these students with a fair expectation of their success, or at least ability to complete the assignments with some competence.

Having taught broadcast journalism, I know how powerfully engaging are the camcorder and editing deck. I never experienced the students' enthusiasm for writing that this article describes, possibly because broadcast journalism is so product-driven. In a course such as Writing with Video, I predict the results would be different.

Having said all this, however, I still believe that in an indirect way, this article is still more relevant professionally to me than the other three. Even without the advantage of the advanced technology in a lab environment, modifications of some of these ideas could be implemented in various ways. For instance, my retrieval students are working on an argument about a social issue, in which they must interview three primary sources and produce a letter to an authentic audience to attempt to effect change. Using Kress's terms, these students will be engaging in discourse, design, production, and distribution. Only the medium of production will differ from the visual argument described in this chapter. In short I think that on a practical level, we must look for the most engaging way to achieve similar results, given the resources we have. In a comment that could apply to teachers as designers as well as other designers of communication, Kress notes that what we need to consider is what is the design that best meets requirements of the social and cultural environment, with these demands for communication of these materials, for that audience, with these resources, and "these interests of mine" (as quoted in Wysocki 2 ).

Although I found the Kress and Leeuewen article incredibly tedious, their model of close "reading" of the children's bedroom design demonstrates that one may read anything for meaning. I may add something similar to my visual rhetoric/media literacy units.
I appreciated Wysocki's clarifying notes on the term "affordances," which I had interpreted as possibly connotations or peripheral meanings while reading Kress. As an educator whose autonomy is threatened by increasingly more prescriptive dictums on teaching, I also was struck by Kress's statement "...when design and production separate, design becomes a means for controlling the action of others, the potential for a unity between discourse, design and production diminishes, and there is no longer room for the 'producers' to make the design 'their own', to add their own accent" (9). I suppose if push came to shove as a result of NCLB and my school's "failing" status, I could refer critics to this article.

Group partners, what do you think about Wysocki's assertions (roughly paraphrased) that Kress's usage of dichotomies (writing/page, image/screen) is incompatible with the concept of multi-modalities and, essentially, perpetuates the us/them, male/female, etc. limitations inherent in dichotomies? See you on Wednesday. Cheers!