Thinking about (teaching) design

I've taught visual design in freshman composition classes before, and I always encourage my students to be creative about the materiality of their papers and to think about what that materiality itself communicates. The experience of teaching some basic principles of designing texts visually complicates my views on teaching students to produce multi-modal texts.

Every time I took part of a semester (I haven't tried this on a quarter system) to discuss visual design and have students produce multimodal texts, I found I couldn't take enough time to really be effective. Just the most basic principles of producing visual texts: some basic typography, issues of layout, focal points, creating emphasis, avoiding distracting visual problems, white-space, variety takes considerable time to cover because, with most students, I would have to start from scratch. This compares to having to teach students basic reading and writing before teaching them composition.

I am not really surprised that a lot of those who advocate for having students construct multimodal texts seem to advocate just asking students to produce these texts rather than attempting to help them do so skillfully. This, however, conflicts with what Wysocki advocates in Writing New Media. If we are only asking students to produce multimodal texts without taking the time to address how those texts communicate materially we are certainly not "bring[ing] to new media texts a humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption, which is currently missing" (7). We are simply teaching abstract concepts about rhetoric and the communication of ideas through an invisible medium.

Add to this, of course, the whole complication of technology (which many of my students were largely ignorant about) and we find ourselves dedicating a great deal of class time just laying the groundwork for teaching students to produce successful texts. I find it telling that Takayoshi and Selfe avoid rather than answer the question: "When you add a focus on multimodality to a composition class, what do you give up?"

I, of course, have been discussing just teaching the visual design of printed texts, which is a minor step beyond teaching traditional alphabetic writing. What happens when we try to add video composition to a class? If we want to teach how to use images effectively, shouldn't we teach students to skillfully manipulate photographs?

So, what does all this have to do with discussing Wysocki's approach to defining new media texts as "those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality"? I think that one of the implications of this definition is an attempt on Wysocki's part to downplay the difficulty of introducing the production of new media texts into the classroom. If writing new media simply means producing texts that are self-consciously material, then that might not seem like such a big endeavor as trying to teach students to create their own website—at least one that isn't ridiculously tacky and obviously uncaring of its materiality. My experience, however, suggests that even spending the time to call attention to the materiality of the essays students write and help them to incorporate images, even type as image, requires a dedication of time and resources that necessarily replaces something else.

I may be unfairly attributing such an implication to Wysocki's definition, but it is something that seemed implied in the rhetoric of the reading. Perhaps Wysocki is not trying to downplay the time, resources, and effort necessary to address new media in the classroom. If so, I rather like her definition of new media. I think it counteracts some major problems in the way new media is often presented—that is as if no one ever thought about, or needed to think about, the material appearance of texts before computers came along.

I agree that our attention to new media should embrace a broader attention to the materiality of texts and how we are situated by and through those various materialities—though "new media" does become somewhat meaningless here. After all, I didn't try to do units on design and layout just for kicks. I think they are important parts of writing that are significantly neglected—and significantly and often abused by writing instructors. I try, even when I don't attempt to teach visual design, to present texts that depart from the traditional materiality of texts, starting with my syllabus. But, I think that there are many other aspects to writing that are more important—so many, in fact, that I can't cover them all in a quarter or a semester. As of now, writing and new media is a great focus for an upper division class, maybe even a 308J class, but not something that I feel inclined to devote significant time to in a 151 class.

Of course, I think that students should take more than just two required writing classes, and I could easily get behind an effort to at least provide if not require more writing classes including writing and new media—ah the dreams of a world without business oriented administration.