Because someone sent me an email asking why I didn’t share this here—I didn’t realize historians taught composition or were particularly interested in how it was taught—and I don’t turn down requests:
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The Edge of the American West 
9 comments
February 11, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Jonathan Dresner
We teach everything, Scott. It’s our curse: I’m going to be spending some dedicated time this summer collecting, annotating and figuring out how to effectively use artistic and cultural visual materials in class. There’s the usual portraiture-and-map stuff that all of us use in some form or another. But I spend time in World History and my Asian history classes talking about cultural history, including visual culture. I don’t have time for a deep and sophisticated analysis, but once in a while it would be fun to throw up an image and be able to say something more than “this was new back then” and parrot the textbook stuff about techniques.
Visual materials can be fantastic for social history discussions, for material culture discussions, but we aren’t trained how to do that. We’re trained as textualists, and we’re damned good at it. But images befuddle us.
February 11, 2009 at 10:42 pm
ari
we’re damned good at it
Speak for yourself, bub.
February 12, 2009 at 4:08 am
[links] Link salad wishes it was a fisherman, tumbling on the seas | jlake.com
[…] Lesson Planning 101: How to teach comics responsibly in a composition class (Watchmen) — Snurched from The Edge of the American West. […]
February 12, 2009 at 7:41 am
Kieran
Ontologists have to teach material composition responsibly, but that is a different problem.
February 12, 2009 at 7:44 am
MichaelElliott
These are great posts, Scott. I am wondering, though, if you can say more about the kind of writing assignments that you use with these kinds of materials — especially in a first-year writing course. You don’t have to give away all your tricks, but I think designing good assignments is one of the hardest things about teaching composition.
February 12, 2009 at 1:20 pm
dana
Friends don’t let friends detach rabbit parts.
February 12, 2009 at 2:17 pm
SEK
Alright, who broke the comments?
I don’t have time for a deep and sophisticated analysis, but once in a while it would be fun to throw up an image and be able to say something more than “this was new back then” and parrot the textbook stuff about techniques.
Jonathan, I’ve found that taking the images apart for non-classroom public consumption has had a dramatic impact on my ability to teach the material briefly but justly. It’s a time-sink—and one we’re not rewarded for visiting—but it’s worth it.
I am wondering, though, if you can say more about the kind of writing assignments that you use with these kinds of materials — especially in a first-year writing course.
Michael, I have a couple of assignments. The first, which they just started today, involves them working in groups to create wikis for the texts we’ve read. Sounds like busy-work, I know, but it’s an incredibly useful exercise. Each wiki must provide an entry on:
What they’re doing is creating a usable text for the rhetorical analysis assignment—and learning to use the library, as they’re required to cite five books (!?!). As for the rhetorical analysis itself, as those links indicate, my main goal is to get them to understand that identifying rhetorical strategies can lead them to understanding what an author/director/screenwriter was trying to convince his audience of; that is, we work backwards from rhetorical act to authorial intent. Yes, that’s a theoretically problematic exercise, but it’s one worth doing because it compels them to think about audience—a concept with which they are deeply unfamiliar. But in order to discuss audience expectations, they have to do research on, say, the political climate in which Moore wrote and his audience received Watchmen. Same for Kane and Detective Comics, &c. So the categories “audience,” “perception” and “historical context” are meant to breakdown, and they do, to great effect.
This is one respect in which those posts don’t accurately represent what I do in the classroom, because they’re all about the creating the tools they need to analyze the interplay of author and audience.
February 12, 2009 at 2:32 pm
MichaelElliott
Very interesting, Scott. Thanks for taking the time to write this out. I’ve heard of some other people using wikis as a way of getting students to do the writing that leads up to a full-blown essay, and this sounds intriguing. You should, you know, be a teacher or something.
February 12, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Mr. Sidetable
Some of you textualists might be interested in this:
http://www.americanantiquarian.org/chavicsummer2009.htm