Fields of Vision: A Background Study of References for Teachers

      Anne R. Richards and Carol David

      Writing teachers hoping to awaken in students a broad understanding of the cultural influences on individuals or of the rhetorical elements influencing the interpretation of discourse do well to acknowledge the importance of the visual: how we live, think, act, and read are all influenced profoundly by images appearing in print and digital media. The authors of the twelve essays published in this collection advocate an enlivened writing pedagogy reflecting the importance of complementary ways of knowing to our students. Teachers will find, in the chapters that follow, useful methods of importing the visual, frameworks informing these methods, and suggested assignments. This introduction summarizes a variety of ways of approaching the visual in the writing classroom, as well as sources that teachers may wish to consult.

      “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing,” Diana George’s history of the visual in composition teaching, recognizes the secondary position the visual has taken in our classrooms for the brief time it has been of interest to us: during this period, a sensitivity to the visual has only slowly and tenuously emerged. She observes, however, that new media are revolutionizing composition teaching because “for students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and an image-rich culture, questions of communication and composition absolutely will include the visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as complex communication intricately related to the world around them” (32). James E. Porter, in his account of the ethics of internetworked writing, states flatly that “[w]riting in the 21st century will be electronic” (103). From what we have experienced over the last decade in our ever more complexly networked classrooms, we must agree with him.

      Notwithstanding, digital and print media are different and require distinct pedagogical approaches. Recalling Aristotle’s concepts of “coherence and perfection of artistic form,” which until recently have depended on the existence of a “beginning, middle, and end [. . .] based on fixed texts” (125), Richard A. Lanham observes that these architectonic concepts are being dismantled even as we write. The changes are often bewildering because, as Marshall McLuhan astutely observes, new media change what it means for their users to be human. When “a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world,” he writes, “[T]hen new ratios among all our senses occur” (41).

      Communicators in the age of hypertext are undergoing, in Lanham’s words, a “readjustment of the alphabet/image ration.” And one of the most transformative potentials of digital technology, according to Lanham, is to “dissolve before our eye [. . .] the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts” (13). Indeed, “the same volatility” that is shaking rhetoric’s edifice “dissolves the boundaries between the arts”: the shock we may experience upon encountering new computer technologies suggests the profundity of the change only beginning to occur in the “digital metamorphoses of the arts and letters” (13). Teachers of composition and communication who do not intend to obstruct the transformation that Lanham describes should, ideally, be as skilled in the use of hypertext as the average 18-year-old entering our classrooms. At the very least, we must acquire to the best of our abilities the skills needed to interpret and to create images and sounds and to integrate them electronically with discourse.

      Understandably, however, writing teachers may be reluctant to revise pedagogies to reflect a focus on composing in digital environments. We may fear, for instance, that time dedicated to the visual will be time taken from writing—that we may be guilty of “dumbing down” the curriculum if we do not focus exclusively on discourse. That we have been trained to discuss words rather than pictures contributes to our reluctance to introduce images into the curriculum. In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, W. J. T. Mitchell describes a “fear” that English studies historically has had of images—namely, that their presence will diminish the laboriously constructed superiority of the word as signifier. Yet reading time need not be affected by our including visual texts among the verbal texts we assign students, and writing time need not be affected at all. Our composition students typically are exposed to a wide variety of genres and rhetorical situations, and many of our most widely used writing textbooks, mirroring the texts students encounter in their daily lives, already incorporate images. Our students read, discuss, and write about not only belletristic essays but also visually enhanced advertising, journalism, Internet writing, and, in WAC classrooms, forms of quite specialized