Post Secret

In the time since my first multimodal composition teaching experience at Upward Bound, I’ve come to find that students can largely teach themselves many of the platforms involved in contemporary digital writing. Part of what makes Jenkins’ description of participatory culture so accurate and the implied demand for critical literacy training so pertinent is that, in direct contradiction to many writing teachers’ fears, multimodal composing platforms are now decreasing in price and increasing in ease. While Photoshop may take many months of constant use to master and can cost upwards of seven hundred dollars, other web-based applications are free and fairly easy to use. One can easily explore the limits of its options in the course of a sitting or two. Since much image manipulation, audio editing, and video production is done in response to an in-the-moment demand, all kinds of users are turning to mobile and web-based apps that can complete simple, single-click tasks with customizable templates, rather than those more professional platforms that offer a plethora of complex tools, endless possibilities, and a blank canvas.

 

At this moment in the teaching of basic writing, then, I believe that it is no longer necessary to fear the digital and multimodal. It is less important that we overexert ourselves in mastering difficult programs on our own time in order to teach them, and more important that we teach students how to learn digital composing technologies while also accomplishing our curricular goals of teaching critical thinking and the tools of rhetorical effectiveness. At every step in the following sample assignment, I ask students to think recursively about every aspect of their own compositions while analyzing the multimodal work of others in order to meet some of the aims of my university’s writing program, including that we:

  1. Promote critical literacy in students to prepare them for an increasingly complex and multi-mediated world.
  2. Teach writing for a variety of contexts: academic, professional, and public.
  3. Provide a rigorous undergraduate composition curriculum that helps students develop skills in academic literacy, including critical reading, writing, analysis, argument, and research skills.
  4. Provide an undergraduate curriculum that teaches writing as a social practice, giving special attention to issues of diversity as they affect rhetorical practice.
  5. Create an inquiry-based teaching and learning environment.
  6. Serve the local and global communities by co-creating, disseminating, sharing, and applying knowledge. (The Syracuse Univeristy Writing Program)

While preparing for a recent summer basic writing class, I realized that I had been denying to my recent basic writing students the opportunity for developing their rhetorical skills in the context of multimodal writing assignments. Upon making this observation, I created for my syllabus a visual analysis unit, whose assignments you see below. For this unit project, pairs of students are asked to select an image from the online community art project “PostSecret” and make a claim about its rhetorical efficacy, supported on the basis of visual analysis. They must investigate and present the historical/social context surrounding the issue involved in the image, and provide a reading of the image as a whole in the course of an eight-page, standard academic essay. Using the elements and principles of formal visual analysis as tools for supporting their claims, students work with a free imaging platform to crop representative segments of the original image and include them in their essays as evidence of their critiques. Hence, while critiquing the visual rhetorical strategies of another author’s work and evaluating its use against the background of its social context, the course asks writers to evaluate their own rhetorical choices of text and image, summary, source integration, and analysis. Students post their work to our class’s free, public Google site, allowing their work the possibility of circulation and the visual quality of web publishing.

 

The unit then takes a further recursive step when students really move from writer to designer with the use of Prezi, a free web-based presentation application tool. Learning to use Prezi requires my students to view Prezi's tutorial video, Step-by-Step Tutorial on Prezi Basics, listen to my delivery of a live demo, and work on their own projects in a computer lab. In-class work time also allows more apt students to help each other learn to use a particular online platform, and I can be available to provide individualized attention. More importantly, I model the practice of asking and answering questions with some creative Googling and searching of YouTube and other online forums. Searching for information is among the most important digital literacy skills we can teach our students, and one that saves time and anxiety for teachers concerned with having all the answers themselves.

 

Once familiar with the platform, students work in pairs to translate the content of their longer essay into a 10-12 minute oral presentation in which they use the power of the Prezi platform to serve as visual accompaniment to their oral arguments. They are asked to think about the tools of live persuasion, including humor, staging, and volume, in order to be compelling to their fellow classmates and to me. Moving from critique to implementation, the Prezi project demands careful cultivation and conscious choice of modal elements such as audio, video, text and image, as well as general arrangement, color, and style.

 

I’ve found this project to be a highly effective assignment for teaching visual and rhetorical analysis and design, while also attending to the conventions of academic writing. This project is impossible to effectively carry out without explicit attention to the medium and the message. Students engage the social problems reflected in the secrets they choose with raw emotion and fierce advocacy for what they believe is just; common topics include sexuality, violence, suicide, marriage/relationships/divorce, religion, race, money and work, popular media, and politics. Thus, this assignment prompts the common work of a basic writing class, but with visual rhetorical criticism, direct attention to the medium, the opportunity to write multimodally (including live performance), and, frankly, gusto on the part of the students.

 

I cannot offer examples of student work here due to human subject research limitations, but I can tell you that students completed all steps of this assignment in about a week and a half. The ease of the applications, and their accessibility from any internet-connected computer, allowed for limited time spent teaching the tool and hence, much more time to discuss the rhetorical choices related to the writing as well as the medium. Some students found working with Prezi to be a bit clunky, but I’m not sure they would have maintained that position if I had taught, say Photoshop or Camtasia, alongside it. The most important lesson I drew from teaching Prezi is that a hands-off approach that gives time for play, guidance, and revision is the best way to help students become comfortable with the platform and produce high quality multimedia presentations. Balancing accessibility of platforms with attention to rhetoric and materiality has turned out to be among the most important steps I have taken toward the goal of cultivating critical digital literacy for my developing and advanced students.

 

I invite readers to contemplate, adapt, and/or comment on the assignments from this project, which I've included below. Or, feel free to navigate directly to the conclusion.

PostSecret Visual Analysis Essay Assignment

Visual literacy is quickly becoming among the most important tools in one’s literacy toolbox. As a society we are flooded with so many images in our public/private, and virtual/physical lives that failure to decode the meaning and motive of images can have potentially devastating consequences. As educational theorists Melissa Thibault and David Walbert write:


Visual literacy is the ability to see, to understand, and ultimately to think, create, and communicate graphically. Generally speaking, the visually literate viewer looks at an image carefully, critically, and with an eye for the intentions of the image’s creator. Those skills can be applied equally to any type of image: photographs, paintings and drawings, graphic art (including everything from political cartoons to comic books to illustrations in children’s books), films, maps, and various kinds of charts and graphs. All convey information and ideas, and visual literacy allows the viewer to gather the information and ideas contained in an image, place them in context, and determine whether they are valid.


In the final unit of this semester, you’ll be working with a partner to produce a rhetorical analysis of an image you’ve selected from the PostSecret Archive, in which you will demonstrate your ability to “read” images for their content, composition, arrangement, and other design features. In what ways do the author’s design choices support their message? You must describe the message, audience, purpose, context, effect, and use of ethos, pathos and logos of the secret. You essentially must make an argument for how you wish your reader to understand the secret. Analysis of visual details of the image will ultimately support your claim.


Marshall McLuhan explains in his iconic piece, "The Medium is the Message" the relationship between meaning and mode of media:


Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of the media is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware of print or of speech. (McLuhan 207)


Hence, in this essay you will see past the juicy meat of the secrets themselves and will think about the spaces in which they appear and through which they flow–the medium. You will make claims about how to understand the secret in terms of its having been mailed, scanned, and posted to the Internet on a blog. You might reflect on how anonymity can be protected or jeopardized through the US mail (this is often mentioned in the content of the secrets themselves). You might ask how and why the Internet serves as an appropriate space in which to publically display one’s darkest secrets in such a visually complex way. You might write about the form of blogs and how community can form via a space like PostSecret (many people also reflect on this within their secrets). Either way, the question of how the medium affects the message must be addressed (i.e. you must make a claim about that somewhere in your essay and devote some time to supporting your claim).


Finally, I would like you to make a claim about the social issue addressed in your chosen secret. If your secret is about an extramarital affair, for instance, you should address the general issue of infidelity at this moment in our culture’s unfolding history, and how the secret reflects, complicates, or contradicts popular ideology or practice on the subject.


Here’s the important part: all of your mini-claims about your rhetorical and visual reading of the secret, analysis of its medium and analysis of the social context/problem need to be folded together into one overarching claim (in your introduction) that is supported by detailed analysis throughout the essay.

Your group’s 8-page essay must include the following:

  • An introduction that provides background and context
  • A clearly stated and complex claim (in the introduction)
  • Mini-claims about the overall message of the secret you choose to work with, about the medium in which the secret appears, and the overall social context and particular social issue located by your secret
  • Detailed, claim-supporting analysis of the visual, rhetorical, modal, and social aspects of your secret
  • Outside sources where needed
  • Transitions, voice markers, summaries, the source formula where appropriate, and constant justification of why you’re saying what you’re saying when you’re saying it
  • Full and complete in-text citation and a works cited for every text you include in your essay, including your secret in MLA 2009 format
  • Visual proof from your image where appropriate
  • A powerful conclusion

PostSecret Prezi Assignment

In this unit you’ll be working on thinking critically about the language of images. In the essay portion of the PostSecret project, you’ll be looking at how senders of the postcards construct meaning through visual design, rhetorical strategies, the engaging of social problems, and through the medium by which we encounter those meanings. An essay is a medium in itself. In this course you’ve become accustomed to using text and the Internet as vehicles through which to express your own meaning. Another important literacy and rhetorical skill, however, is understanding how to build your arguments through visual and oral presentations to a live audience. In this part of the unit, you will practice giving a group oral presentation on your topic using Prezi, a web-based presentation application.


In this 10-12 minute presentation, you and your partner will do the following:

  • Present each of the four claims required by the project in a logical order, and using relevant details
  • Include visual evidence from your chosen secret
  • Combine text and images in a well-designed Prezi whose visual composition makes sense for the order and meaning of your overall argument
  • Share speaking time between each partner

A word to the wise: DO NOT simply read from the screen when you present. Memorize as much as you can and use note cards for the rest. Also, be sure to give credit to any sources or images you include in your presentation (create a consistent and visually un-intrusive method of doing so).

 

 

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