Kamila Kinyon's Panel Summaries

Session C.27 Visualizing the New Writing Center: Integrating Verbal and Visual Rhetorics
Chaired by Douglas Hesse, this panel included talks by Corinne Hinton, John Tiedemann, Eliana Schonberg, and Sue Mendelsohn.
In her talk, Theorizing Visual Rhetoric in the Writing Center, Hinton referred to making waves as a metaphor for change. She discussed different uses of images, from the use of illustrations as aids to the visual to the wave of the future in website design and digital comics. She discussed the division of literacy into visual, aural, kinesthetic, textual, and digital. In the theoretical perspectives she provided, Hinton emphasized differences between activity theory, semiotics, and new media studies. In activity theory, activities result in an end goal. Internalization allows people to try out potential interaction. Semiotics distinguishes between linguistic systems and pictorial systems. According to Gunther Kress, semiotics must be changed to a pictorial or digital focused system. New Media Studies focuses on networkable systems which can be manipulated and compressed. In conclusion, Hinton called for a new theoretical construct drawing on an intersection between new media studies, activity theory, and semiotics as rhetorical and cultural lenses that can enable us to embrace creativity and avoid stagnation.

In the second talk, John Tiedemann discussed rhetorical theory and humor in his teaching. In teaching the analysis and creation of visual texts, Tiedemann reverses the conventional approach. Instead of using the verbal to explain the visual, he takes visual rhetorical concepts as primary and then applies these to the verbal. Tiedemann described several of his pedagogical experiments in translating between the visual and the verbal. In Write this Picture, Tiedemann gives his students several pictures and asks students to compose a sentence describing them. In connection with this assignment, Tiedemann referred to Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a philosophical framework for how language represents the world. Grammatical form is central, trumping lexicon. Language as logical form behaves like pictorial form. For each image that students are given, they must compose a sentence whose grammatical form recreates the images pictorial form. For example, elongation of figures in a visual image may result in the elongation of a sentence. In another assignment, Tiedemann asks students to turn the ideas of their argument into a pictorial story. To explain this assignment, Tiedemann referred to Scott McClouds ideas for understanding and making comics. Forms of transition may include, for instance, moment to moment, action to action, or aspect to aspect. Tiedemann explained the pedagogical value of his teaching assignments in making students consider questions of linguistic form, creating a concrete analogy to visual materials, and freeing students from formal rules.

In Training Writing Center Consultants to Be Visual Rhetoricians, Eliana Schonberg discussed a study at the University of Denver in which 766 first-year students were surveyed about the role of visual rhetoric assignments in their classes. 540 (70%) had to make PowerPoint presentations. A high percentage of sophomores had to make PowerPoints. Schonberg stressed the importance of marketing and of establishing best practices in multimodal composition. She quoted David Sheridan, who stresses the need for writing centers to pay attention to multimodal instruction. Schonberg discussed the theoretical approaches that are needed in writing centers concerning such issues as planning for hypertexts, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and blogging. We shouldnt get caught up in media without embracing research. Training must depend on a rhetorical approach beyond the process-centered model. In discussing visual and verbal rhetoric, we cant easily distinguish higher- from lower-order concerns. Schonberg referenced Joseph Petralias statement that process no longer offers much insight into the visual and the multimodal. She then urged that we should learn from post-process theorists. Discourse moves may offer a more useful framework than process. We should focus on how readers interact with texts, relying on a rhetorical model.

In the last talk, Sue Mendelsohn began with reference to the difficulty and complexity at the heart of the scholarly endeavor. As Heraclitus said, we cant step twice into the same river. Mendelsohn discussed how we should see visual and verbal rhetoric holistically. She stressed the importance of re-branding, discussing traditional metaphors such as borderlands and margins and referring to marginalization as a tired horse. The talk then moved into re-institutionalized topography. Mendelsohn discussed her influence by Harvey Keels notion of writing centers. It is important for writing centers to become multiliteracy centers and multimedial centers in which digital media studies plays a more prominent role.

Featured F Session: Becoming Ecocomposition
Chaired by Marilyn Cooper, this featured session had two speakers, Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin. Weisser, professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of six books and numerous articles on ecocomposition. His talk, Towards the Ecology of Writing, addressed the relationship between composition, theory, and pedagogy and recent work in ecocomposition. Weisser discussed the history of ecocomposition and the interest in the field by social constructionists, ecofeminists, and scholars in cultural studies. He criticized those who use environment as a tool for activism and as a subject for raising ecological awareness. According to Weisser, no real insights into the activity of writing can emerge from this. Instead, Weisser urged that more attention should be paid to the ecology of writing. One can use the term ecology for how discourse operates as a cognitive system. Writing is an activity engaging with a socially constituted system. Weisser sees concepts of ecology in terms of complex systems theories. In Geographies of Writing: Locations of Composition, research is seen as an ecological activity. This book, however, had little impact on composition as a whole. In order to shape the field, we need more than a recasting of social-constructivist models. Weisser called for the use of complex systems theories and network theories, which include a focus on the ways knowledge spreads and on the properties of information.

The second talk was by Sidney Dobrin, director of the writing program at the University of Florida and author and editor of more than a dozen books about writing, environment, and their intersections. Dobrin drew links between ecocomposition and post-composition. In the binary between writing as spatial versus temporal, ecological writing focuses on the spatial. Dobrin discussed several reasons for the failure of ecocomposition to become central as a field. Few people have taken up ecology as a subject of research. We need to draw on complexity and network theories and think about pedagogy from a post-humanist perspective. It is important to embrace writing as a system. Ecology is the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments. Complex ecology looks beyond the individual and species. In ecocomposition we must not look at subject formation but, rather, should consider writing as a system. Dobrin outlined the connections between ecocomposition and the post-humanist theoretical frameworks of Foucault, Adorno, Guattari, and Deleuze. Ecocomposition, he concluded, is the locus of interaction and relation.

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