Composing @Play

Modern college students traverse the boundaries of traditional literacy daily. Maturing alongside Web 2.0 and multimodal social networking, these young people tweet, blog, email, film, photograph, illustrate, hyperlink, and compose their lives regardless of formal instruction. Therefore rhetorically analyzing a student\u27s recreational play with image, video, audio, and oral mediums often proves helpful for writing instructors who wish to better mentor and engage the communicative capacities of those born in the late 20th century and after. Yet few educators have actively pursued this line of inquiry over the last couple of decades. Many continue to favor traditional pairing of academic discourse with alphabetic literacy, logic, and media. Unfortunately, this means academic writing in general, and composition studies in particular, grow increasingly obsolete when facing a generation of young people whose nearly native relationship with new media encourages them to transcend the computer screen and channel their digital fluencies toward (re)composing physical reality. Few incidents illustrate the stakes and values of such conditions more clearly than the recent case of the Barefoot Bandit-a seemingly average teenager from Washington State, who made international headlines for his two-year joyride with reality: stealing vehicles, flying planes, evading police, robbing businesses, and hijacking the hearts of his peers. Armed with little more than an Apple laptop and iPod, Internet access allegedly sponsored the Barefoot Bandit\u27s specialized education in breaking the law. Not wishing to validate his unlawful behavior, my research awards importance rather to the hardly exceptional nature of his personal technologies, literacies, and motivations. In an age where any given American teenager may access the same technological resources, the lasting influence of formal education seems questionable when facing a digitally literate generation of perpetual bandits. By rhetorically analyzing the discursive conditions instigating young people to (re)compose their own educations, the following study elucidates and tests a new interpretive model for educators to use in assessing and challenging the abilities of a generation whose multifaceted literacies seem best nourished by banditry. For writing education to retain relevancy, composition pedagogues must look to the fringes of modern composing practices-where students (at least digitally) know and compose valuable non-institutional texts for diverse audiences

Remixing Pedagogy: How Teachers Experience Remix as a Tool for Teaching English Language Arts

Remix, a type of digital multimedia composition created by combining existing media to create new texts offers high school teachers a non-traditional approach to teaching English Language Arts (ELA). As technology in the U.S. has become more accessible and affordable, literacy practices outside school classrooms have changed. While there is a growing body of research about remix and remix culture, most of it is set outside the ELA classroom by focusing on activities after school hours or specialty courses in creative writing or technology classes. Teachers’ points of view are largely left out of studies that examine in-school experiences with remix. Additionally, existing studies are often set in either higher education or elementary schools. This case study sought to understand how two high school ELA teachers experienced using remix as a tool for teaching and how practicing remix informed their pedagogies. The study revealed insight into why teachers find it challenging to practice new pedagogies in their teaching. I grounded my theoretical framework in sociocultural theories and a remix of Peirce’s (1898) semiotic theory with Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995) transactionalism. Designed within a case study methodology, data sources included teacher remixes, recorded conversations in online meetings, emails, texts, telephone calls, and a detailed researcher journal. Data analysis included multiple iterations of open coding of transcripts, informed by grounded theory and tools of discourse analysis, as well as visual analyses of teacher-created remixes. Key findings showed that, while teachers desired to incorporate remix teaching tools for meeting student needs, constraints of professional learning obligations, state standards, and administrator expectations limited their use of non-traditional practices. Both teachers approached remix differently, encouraging their students to construct meaning through multimodal tools, while still finding paths to meeting administrative requirements through remix. Further, remix allowed teachers to increase the student-centeredness of their pedagogy and at the same time support multiple student learning styles. This study also extends prior theoretical scholarship about remix by contributing a study of knowledge-in-action, focusing on teachers as their remix experiences unfolded

Mashing through the Conventions: Convergence of Popular and Classical Music in the Works of The Piano Guys

This dissertation is dedicated to examining the symbiosis between popular music and Western classical music in classical/popular mashups––a new style within the classical crossover genre. The research features the works of The Piano Guys, a contemporary ensemble that combines classical crossover characteristics and the techniques from modern sample-based styles to reconceptualize and reuse classical and popular works. This fusion demonstrates a new approach to presenting multi-genre works, forming a separate musical and cultural niche for this creative practice. This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter is further divided into two thematic discourses: genre and authorship. The research draws on Eric Drott’s (2013) position that contemporary genre definition is a heterogeneous product of technological and cultural shifts in creation, production and presentation of music. Following Thomas Johnson’s (2018) research on genre in post-millennial popular music, the first part of the chapter traces chronological developments of genre categorizations and attempts to place classical/popular mashups as a separate style within the contemporary genre framework. The second part investigates the transformations and the current state of authorship attributions in popular music and illustrates how group creativity and consumer participation prompt multiple authorial distributions in classical/popular mashups. Applying Topic Theory established by Robert Hatten (1985) and Kofi Agawu (1992) and concepts of intertexuality developed by Serge Lacasse (2000, 2018) to the works of The Piano Guys and other musical works of the same style, the second chapter presents a comparative analysis, revealing a multi-layered structure of signification different from the intertextual and topical relationships found in the works of other styles. In the third chapter the detailed exploration of three works by The Piano Guys places these methodological theories in dialogue with formal analysis to draw out a series of quantifiable technical, musical and interpretive characteristics that differentiate “classically originated” mashups from similar practices in other genres

Expressions and embeddings of deliberative democracy in mutual benefit digital goods

Since democracy is so desirable and digital technologies are so flexible and widespread it is worth asking what sort of digital technologies can, through use, enhance democratic practice. This question is addressed in three stages. First, the notion of Mutual Benefit Digital Goods (MBDGs) is developed as a tool for discerning the digital goods that hold a potential for nurturing democratic virtues. MBDGs are those digital goods that allow a user to make such goods one’s own and to put something of oneself into them. This can be achieved either directly, by working at creating a derivative of a digital good, or by engaging a community of production for digital goods. The second stage is the identification of a theory of democracy that is adequate for discussing democracy in relation to cyberspace. Deliberative democracy, particularly as presented by Dryzek, is put forward as the most appropriate conception of democracy to be used. This conception makes it possible to overcome the difficulties posed by the notions of citizens and borders as presented in other conceptions of democracy. In relation to cyberspace, such notions are particularly problematic. In the last stage, MBDGs and deliberative democracy are brought together by means of the theory of technological mediation and Feenberg's theory of technological subversion. The theory of mediation holds that the use of technologies modulates our moral landscape. Because of mediation, subversion of digital technologies is always self-expressive to some extent. Therefore it exhibits the same grounding characteristics as deliberative democracy: mutual respect, reciprocity, provisionality and equality. Since MBDGs are most open to subversion, they are also the digital technologies with the most potential for fostering democracy. This claim is corroborated by looking at iconic MBDGs (Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software and Wikipedia) and revealing how the virtues necessary for deliberation are manifest in some of the activities surrounding these digital goods. The ideas presented, if accepted, have practical implications for institutions desirous of enhancing democratic practice. Such institutions ought to evaluate their choices on digital technologies also on grounds of democratic potential, reduce obstacles to alternative appropriation of digital goods through regulation, and foster MBDGs

Sounding Composition, Composing Sound: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Pedagogies, and Everyday Experience

My dissertation re-imagines the teaching of listening in rhetoric and composition to account for sonic experiences in the twenty-first century. Technologies such as audio editing and music software allow users to control sound in ways that were not possible for the average listener before personal computers and digital audio devices became widely available. While digital technologies have presented new opportunities for re-thinking how to teach listening in relation to composing, they have also resulted in a selective and limited understanding of how sound works and affects in the world at large. The aim of my dissertation is to offer a listening pedagogy that helps students capitalize on the compositional affordances of sound in digital contexts and retrains them to become more thoughtful, sensitive listener-composers of sound in any setting. Drawing from the listening and composing practices of deaf musician Evelyn Glennie, acoustic designers, and automotive acoustic engineers, I propose an expansive, explicitly embodied approach to the teaching of listening in rhetoric and composition. The listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening, a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. Unlike ear-centric listening practices in which listeners’ main goal is to hear and interpret audible sound (often language), multimodal listening practices move beyond the exclusively audible by emphasizing the ecological relationship between sound, bodies, and environments. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives

2018 FSDG Combined Abstracts

https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg_abstracts/1000/thumbnail.jp

Supporting students' Chinese learning through the platform of social media : Edmodo

From an educational perspective this thesis explores the social media platform Edmodo as a method to support Chinese language teaching and learning in Australian public primary schools. It focuses on a teacher-researcher's exploration of using information technology ‒ social media, to make Chinese learnable for young beginning learners. In this context the research is timely and significant. The research is carried out as a qualitative case study that involves collecting and analysing data from teaching Chinese language in BR Public School. The aim of this study is to explore the strategies of using social media, Edmodo, to facilitate young students’ learning of Chinese by creating a positive teaching and learning environment where off-class, online activities complement classroom teaching. The first of the evidentiary chapters (Chapter 4) points out the existing challenges of class-based, text-based approaches to teaching and learning Chinese. A full description of these challenges inspired the idea of incorporating Edmodo to support students’ learning. The second (Chapter 5) and third (Chapter 6) evidentiary chapters foreground the implementation of social media strategies and activities in the teaching of Chinese. The findings (Chapter 7) indicate that Edmodo can be used in a supporting role to facilitate students’ successful learning of Chinese language. In the case of this project, an overall assessment of the teacher-research method of professional learning in the context of Chinese language education in an Australian public primary school is that it proved to be a beneficial process

Learn Languages, Explore Cultures, Transform Lives

Selected Papers from the 2015 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Aleidine J. Moeller, Editor 1. Creating a Culture-driven Classroom One Activity at a Time — Sharon Wilkinson, Patricia Calkins, & Tracy Dinesen 2. The Flipped German Classroom — Theresa R. Bell 3. Engaging Learners in Culturally Authentic Virtual Interactions —Diane Ceo-Francesco 4. Jouney to Global Competence: Learning Languages, Exploring Cultures, Transforming Lives — J. S. Orozco-Domoe 5. Strangers in a Strange Land: Perceptions of Culture in a First-year French Class — Rebecca L. Chism 6. 21st Century World Language Classrooms: Technology to Support Cultural Competence — Leah McKeeman & Blanca Oviedo 7. Effective Cloud-based Technologies to Maximize Language Learning — Katya Koubek & John C. Bedward 8. An Alternative to the Language Laboratory: Online and Face-to-face Conversation Groups — Heidy Cuervo Carruthers 9. Free Online Machine Translation: Use and Perceptions by Spanish Students and Instructors —Jason R. Jolley & Luciane Maimone 10. A Corpus-based Pedagogy for German Vocabulary — Colleen Neary-Sundquist 11. Grammar Teaching Approaches for Heritage Learners of Spanish —Clara Burgo 12. Going Online: Research-based Course Design — Elizabeth Harsm