Assignment for January 31 (Wednesday).

For Wednesday:

Reading:

1. Review carefully the Kress and Leeuwen readings, preparing to comment page by page. We’re looking for ways to think about 1) How you’ll encode meaning in the autoethnographic visuals and disrupt conventional meanings, and b) What’s important to teach and why (the other assignment).
2. Choose, if you have not already, something to query in the Haraway. I want us to think about “ontonlogy” or the set of terms or elements by which to define (but not definitively—only provisionally) gender in electronic environments.
3. Review Brodkey’s “Writing on the Bias” for her “moves,” e.g., what does she “do” with a particular scene? How does she use a given scene to make broader points about her own literacy and literacy in general? How does she write the relationship between her experiences and her critique? Choose some specific passages.

Writing:

Using the group blog (and I think Holly is in charge of this), do some brainstorming regarding the parameters of the autoethnography assignment. I’ve set out what I think are the key elements; you can expand on these. And maybe discuss how you think you, personally, will approach these elements. This is a broad prompt, of course, so be as concrete as you can. For example, what do you think you might do with the visual component? I, for example, was noting how Pandey lists three or four “snapshots” at the beginning of his article (in words—verbal snapshots). Were he in this class he might consider encoding these snapshots in visual media—or even in a video clip; he might include some oral Nepali? Written Sanskrit? Ah to be Pandey for this assignment. You can think big even if you know you have not the technical capabilities yet. Then you can talk about what you really actually would be able to do in your present state of literacy.

Additional Reading on your own—some skimming and choice involved:

From from hard-copy reserves:

1. One of the literacy narratives in the Selfe and Hawisher, Literate Lives. My copy is on hard copy, 2-hour reserve in the Zimmerman. Read at least one chapter.
2. Douglas Hesse, “Saving a Place for Essayist Literacy” in Hawisher and Selfe, Passions, Pedagogies . . . . Like the Sirc article below, this is not about autoethnography but about “essayist literacy” in an electronic age—a teaching article. I’m interested here in how the personal essay migrates to electronic modes—so it’s vaguely related to literacy narrative.

From ereserves:

I’ll be putting on ereserves an article by Beatrice Quarshie Smith titled “Teaching with Technologies: A Reflexive Auto-ethnographic Portrait” published in Computers and Compsition 21 (2004). Quarshie Smith is from Ghana—so this may be interesting for Josephine to contrast with her experience. Q-S combines her own technological literacy narrative with her teaching narrative. Please do read this one for sure.

From your own purchases or ILLs:

1. Geoffrey Sirc, “Box Logic,” in Wysocki, Selfe, Sirc, and Johnson-Eilola: Writing New Media. This piece is not about autoethnography but rather about a teaching practice where students “collect” stuff on line for collage assignments. I’m interested in how technologies enable such activities and whether there might be some place for this activity in an autoethnography. I’m not at all sure of the answer. Not available via Zimmerman.