act2



Welcome to [|Act 2]. "[|You're Cellophane]: A Tour of Student Work."

Above you will see the home page for [|Carol Servino], a graduate of the [|MS Program in Professional and Technical Writing] at [|NJIT]. Go to the link for [|Rhetoric], then scroll down to the link for the Mutual Moments Photo Essay. Take the time to listen to that file—it is worth stopping whatever you are thinking about doing next.

Watching Ms. Servino craft that “essay in Power Point” was a turning point in my teaching.

A fine journalist, Ms. Servino was struggling with the standard graduate school reporting structure, the academic essay. There was more the she wanted to tell, an evocative nature that she wanted to convey to....Well, to herself, certainly, and to me, the one assigning grades. Yet there was an overall framework that she wanted to create, a role that she wanted readers to play. She knew, of course, [|Walter Ong’s] famous essay, “[|The Writer’s Audience in Always a Fiction],” and she had read all about [|remediation] from [|Jay David Bolter] and [|Richard Grusin]. Yet she found herself constrained when it came time to communicate what she had experienced in her studies. She didn’t want to persuade me of anything, didn’t want to argue. She wanted, for lack of a better term, to create an [|epiphany] (yes, in the sense that [|James Joyce] meant) for her audiences.

Over the years, I have worked with similar students in my undergraduate [|Documentary Studies] seminar. There, students warm to [|Robert Coles’] reminder in [|Doing Documentary Work] that the noun document is derived from the Latin docere—to teach. My students had found out somethings or others in my seminar, had designed studies that involved interviews with their grandmothers ("[|A Woman in War]")or photos of a renaissance in Jersey City ("[|Downtown]"). They had uncategorized emotions about graduation ("[|Seniors]"). They were getting it, or nearly getting it, and they wanted to tell about that experience.

“And so it goes, then, “Coles has written, “doing documentary work is a journey, and is a little more, too, a passage across boundaries (disciplines, occupations, constraints, definitions, conventions all too influentially closed for traffic), a passage that can become a quest, even a pilgrimage, a movement toward the sacred truth enshrined not only on tables of stone, but in the living hearts of those others whom we can hear, see and get to understand” (145).

My experience with Ms. Servino and others over the past few years has revealed that the conventions in which I had traditionally worked were, all to often, closed for traffic. As a compositionist dedicated to [|writing assessment], my knowledge about forms of written discourse was invaluable; as a compositionist interested in expression fostered by the kinds of aesthetics involved in the new media—image and spoken voice, for instance—my standard mental bibliography of sources on social and cognitive impact was stunningly limited. What decisions do students make when they select an image to accompany a discourse form that exceeds the standard aims of writing. What image goes with a [|numinous] experience? With the admiration and love of a brave grandmother? With the fear of flying after graduation? And what about sound?

It is not that such evocation can’t be rendered by the written word. It is just that it seems rather naive to insist that, unless students can make that which is held between a paperclip serve all purposes, their voices must remain silent.

What we know about academic discourse was constructed within an environment that was dependent in its reliance on the written word, most often conveyed in student essays. That was our sampling plan. What we must seek to know, if we are to help our students prepare for the new world that they daily inhabit, will be found within an emerging world.

In that world, the written word plays only one role among many. We can either enter that theatre, or we can, simply, declare the road there closed.

[|Norbert] PS: For further reflection on a world in which the essay does not dominate, see the [|Student Showcase] of our MSPTC students.