intro from 10/2 drafting session

Developing a new major in Writing and Rhetoric has required the development of new courses and the reappraisal of existing ones. “Writing in Electronic Environments” is one of the courses we are reappraising for our new major. Initially included as a core course to introduce majors to composing electronic portfolios, Writing in Electronic Environments is, for some of us, taking on new significance as we go forward with the development of an actual curriculum. Our multimedia writing course is proving to be a cerntal site for our work in thinking through the major.

For many of us, Kathleen Blake Yancey’s 2004 CCCC Chair’s address captured the moment in which our field must develop a new curriculum and a new major for composition. Yancey’s vision of that present draws together the field’s understanding of emerging mulitimedia literacies with recent research on how writings’ variable distribution and circulation—not just its production—occasions our new pedagogical endeavor. Even acknowledging our sympathies with Yancey’s argument, we were surprised at how much of the major curriculum seemed condensed in Writing in Electronic Environments, a lower-level offering.

Certainly, Writing in Electronic Environments includes work with multimedia composing and many occasions for observing how writing circulates in Internetworked forums. Yet it’s neither the technology nor the chance to teach the circulation of writing that encapsulates the Writing & Rhetoric major: it’s the key term from the title, “environment.” For us, this concept condenses a sense of the complex sites in which writing is produced, circulated, and consumed. . . .

Working through our reappraisal of Writing in Electronic Environments, we discovered that the history of the course parallels the history of our field’s approaches to writing, technology, and rhetoric. First a skills course, then a process course, Writing in Electronic Environments later became a course articulated around the social perils and possibilities of writing with technology. Now, as we bring together our conceptual insights with our understanding of this course and its history, we draw upon our own past approaches to layer together past concerns with a new attention to rhetoric. Like Stuart Selber’s approach in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, we address “skills,” “process,” and “social” concerns simultaneously.