Literacies: Visual and Auditory

EmilyBloom — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:16:50 +0000

Samuel Beckett's Play (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2000)

This is my last Viz posting for the year, so I thought I’d be introspective, or perhaps, self-referential. Specifically, I want to talk about podcasting pedagogy I’ve been experimenting with this semester and how it’s raised interesting questions in our classroom about the relationship between visual and auditory rhetoric. The final assignment for our class was a podcast in which students delivered an argument on a contemporary controversy. It was very strange for all of us to rely so heavily on voice without a piece of paper to mediate the exchange. Early twentieth-century theories of oral delivery such as those by T. Sturge Moore advocated that speakers of poetry should stand behind a curtain so that listeners could listen more attentively and W.B. Yeats suggested that his Abbey Theatre actors should be placed in barrels to train them against using distracting motions. Not wanting quite so drastic an approach, I at least thought that a focus on the auditory would push my students to consider their words in action and more carefully focus on simplicity, organization and delivery.

Image Credit: Screen Shot of Garageband

While I originally intended to outlaw any visuals, I relented and allowed them to use Garageband’s artwork track. This decision was inspired in part by the interesting results of the collaboration between UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center and Badgerdog, a local Austin creative writing program for K-12 students. I loved the way that participants in this program incorporated imagery into their podcasts without losing focus on the attention to language that makes podcasting such an interesting medium. The results were mixed. Some students seemed really motivated by the challenge of auditory delivery and blended interesting music, noises and audio clips into their presentation to create variety in their performances. Others presented simple, elegant spoken arguments with clear delivery. Then there were less successful uses of the medium: students who read papers that should have remained on paper and others who found oral delivery challenging for a variety of reasons. Those students that chose to incorporate visuals were not uniformly successful. I asked students for feedback on what they think defines a good podcast and very few mentioned visuals. They seemed to appreciate the medium as primarily auditory and one best approached through auditory innovation.

Image Credit: Undergraduate Writing Center

In general, my students were much better trained in visual literacy than, pardon the paradox, auditory literacy. However, they seemed to appreciate the particular auditory rhetoric involved in podcasts (which of course borrows heavily from old media such as radio) that to varying degrees they attempted to capture in their presentations. I wanted to end on this note because I think that many of our blogs on Viz are about the audio-visual or performative text rather than the exclusively visual and that we might want to further consider how teaching auditory literacy might help students better understand contemporary audio-visual rhetoric.

The necessity of teaching video composition

John Jones — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:58:05 +0000

A few weeks ago I suggested that the seeming ineptness of many amateur videos indicates that most people are more skilled at textual production than at video production. William Saletan’s piece at Slate on video resumes got me thinking about this topic again. While the popularity of non-commercial videos on youtube argues that our culture is in many ways already video-literate, it is likely that the youtube community is self-selecting for video-savvy individuals. However, Heather Havrilesky’s recent review of Donald Trump’s Apprentice implies that there is a lack of awareness of a broader audience in that group, as well. Since we are near a point when video production will be as ubiquitous as text composition, it will soon become necessary for training everyone in video composition. If this is the case, I think it is likely that a huge part of the training in the rhetoric of video communication will be left to composition departments.

Technological innovations like Apple’s iSight camera, which now comes standard with all of its laptops, will soon put this technology in the hands of everyone with a computer. Returning to the Saletan piece, he provides a fairly inclusive list of pros and cons for video resumes, which, for the purposes of this conversation, can be summed as: everyone is going to start providing video resumes, so you need to as well. If videos are going to be a requirement for job-hunters, who will give students a rhetoric for creating these videos, the topoi that they should cover (or clichés they should avoid), and techniques for presenting themselves to their audience other than composition departments?

Eventually someone is going to have to create a video rhetoric for classroom use. Those of you who are more familiar with film studies might be able to suggest works in that field that already do this. I think the first step towards brining this conversation into the classroom would be assigning student videocasts. Blogging Pedagogy has had some interesting discussions on podcasts, and I think that assignments like this one by John Pedro Schwartz could easily be adapted for students with cameras in their laptops. Any thoughts on other videocast assignments?

viz. - podcast

Literacies: Visual and Auditory

The necessity of teaching video composition