Visual Literacy in the Composition Class

Selfe’s article provided a refreshingly specific guide to incorporating visual literacy into the composition classroom.  I found the article’s justification for this incorporation as increasingly relevant and necessary – given the current cultural turn toward the visual – to be quite sensible and convincing. I was particularly glad that the article acknowledged and accounted for the composition instructor’s potential lack of experience or familiarity with the programs typically used to compose visual texts. My knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion of an activity requiring computer or technological literacy has typically been one of innate aversion due to an embarassing technological incompetence. However, I think I could guide students through the visual essay/argument assignment (which I found most pertinent to my teaching goals), provided I had ample time to prepare.

Wysocki’s article, on the other hand, I found decidedly less useful. The beginning discussion of the need to recognize the materiality of texts in a variety of formats was interesting and convincing, but the assignments the article designed didn’t seem entirely practical for a freshman composition setting. I think I would find it very difficult to make my students take the assignments seriously. I can’t imagine asking them to take out crayons and not feeling a bit silly myself, so I can only presume that they would feel the same. I also feel that, although it’s perfectly valuable to encourage students to think differently about text and writing in different formats, it would make more sense to me, as a potential instructor, to do so while still creating assignments that are more practical and skill-based. The assignments in the Selfe article seemed to fit better into this category and my teaching goals.