Several years ago, I attended a John Jay English Dept-sponsored event, at which J. Elizabeth Clark, an English professor at LaGuardia CC and fellow CUNY rhet/comp traveler, gave a wonderful presentation called “Digital Todays, Digital Tomorrows” at John Jay College. She discussed her passion for scuba diving and then compared the history of diving to education, specifically regarding evolving/changing modalities in educational technologies, composition, and research. She was pointedly critical of the teaching modes and methods prevalent in much– perhaps most– writing instruction today.
Clark began by sharing images of scuba diving equipment from previous decades, and emphasized technological advances in scuba diving equipment, and how these advances had dramatically transformed diving activities. She explained, for example, how by the 1970s, pressure gauges, buoyancy control devices, and single hose regulators had vastly improved and functioned much better, and had became the norm, along with other advances such as dive computers in the 1980s. While, of course, diving gear from the early 1900s would certainly still work, Clark insisted, rightly so, that she is not inclined to use that gear for diving. In fact, the history of scuba diving is incredibly interesting, and of course, along with each technological advancement, new methods of teaching and dive training have also been developed and used. Click here if you have a moment: History of scuba diving
This is not to say that diving (or research) is an utterly altered experience from its ancient beginnings. Current technological advances in scuba diving, though, have nonetheless changed much of how scuba divers operate nowadays. To imagine otherwise would be inconceivable. When she started to talk about research projects in her writing classes, Clark asked us why so many writing teachers and writing classrooms insist on discarding new technologies in ways that divers, for example, never would. It would be like diving into the depths in 2022 with 1914 equipment. It was a compelling argument, and reminded me of the many ways that education generally, and research methodologies in research assignments and the teaching of writing in particular, can rely on outmoded ways of operating, and can be much slower to change than, say scuba diving culture.
Multimedia, mash-up, genre-bending student research projects, if rigorously undertaken and clearly assigned, can be generative learning experiences for students. As long as we instructors set clear goals by creating concrete rubrics and have a clear vision of our primary learning objectives, it will make it much easier when it comes to providing feedback and assessing student work. Obviously, communicating our teaching goals to our students is of paramount importance. Distributing our rubric with the assignment is a good way to achieve this. By offering specific guidelines about the skills we want them to learn we will insure that students are clear about the assignment.