Category: 12) Teaching New Mediated Student Bodies


From the front of the classroom, writing teachers often gaze upon plugged-in, turned-on, digitally mediated student bodies. Yet student participants in the Embodied Literacies research project at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville indicate that even when digital technologies are a visible part of their façade, literacy practices associated with those technologies may feel quite invisible to them. To encourage developing writers to reconsider themselves as reading and writing bodies mediated daily by different (sometimes competing) technologies, this chapter offers five easily adaptable applications for critically analyzing the creation and reception of new media texts. Building from reflective discovery prompts and working toward writing attached to major assignments, these activities extend the work of scholars who reflect on the relationship between the body and rhetoric and literacy-learning. The focus is on how both teachers and students might pay more attention to what is always physical about new media reading and writing, how students already? embody? digital conversations, and the playful nature of online discursive body constructions.

Stacey Pigg’s classroom applications:




Pigg

Stacey Pigg is a PhD student in rhetoric and writing at Michigan State University where she is currently a teaching assistant for the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures. Her concentration is on digital rhetorics and professional writing, as well as cultural rhetorics. She has received an array of awards for teaching and academic service. She is also the research assistant for the Writing in Digital Environments research center where she is working with a research team to design and carry out a rhetorical discourse analysis study of science museum blogs designed to foster public engagement and learning.

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