by Bremen Vance (Original) Teaching writing requires instructors to address a question that does not have a clear answer: what type of writing should students…
Category: Articles
by Maurice Suckling (Original) In his essay on the board game Twilight Struggle (TS) from Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s 2016 collection Zones of…
by Samantha Blackmon () The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen race and race relations in the United States of America return to days…
by Luke A. Iantoro (Original) “While you observe from a distance the great drama which is acting in France, I am a spectator of the…
by Ambereen Dadabhoy (Original) Critical consensus about William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) locates the play’s anxieties and investments within an imperial and colonial milieu.1 Indeed,…
by Barbara Vrachnas (Original) Sir Walter Scott in his 1827 Chronicles of Canongate wrote about the futility of card-playing and gambling and how such activities…
by Robert Sirabian (Original) In London Labour and the London Poor (1851, 1861–2), Victorian social historian Henry Mayhew includes the section “Pickpockets and Shoplifters” in…
by E. Leigh Bonds (Original) In her 1775 “Letter to a Friend on Leaving Town,”, Mary Robinson decries the origin of the fashionable female gamester:…
Abstract
During the summer and fall semester 2012, I took on a project to take every standardized exam our English majors take. Thus, I signed up for and took the GRE General Test, the Praxis Content Area Exam (English Language, Literature, and Composition: Content Knowledge), the Senior Major Field Tests in English and Writing, and the GRE Subject Exam in Literature. My goals in taking the exams varied by the exam, but one overriding goal was consistent: I wanted to see what these exams are actually like, so I can help students prepare for them. When students talk to me about graduate school or a career in teaching, they often ask about one of these exams. However, I had not taken either the GRE General or Subject Exam since the mid-1990s, and I had no idea how or how much the exams had changed since then. When students asked about the Praxis, I was forced to draw on what I had heard from colleagues and students who had taken it. In each case, I was at least partially ill-informed, and taking the exams seemed like the best way to truly understand what our students needed to do to prepare for these tests. What I found is that changes to the GRE General Exam make it much more reflective of the type of thinking required in graduate school, while both the Subject Exam and Praxis have not kept pace with changes in English graduate studies or high and middle school teaching, respectively.
Abstract
Scholars and teachers often focus only on alphabetic texts in the classroom (Palmeri; Alexander and Rhodes; Jewitt; Selfe; Shipka); however, we do our students a disservice if we do not prepare them to compose with and understand the rhetorical consequences of using a variety of modes. In this article, I argue that we need to teach our students to be critically aware of the affordances of each mode as well as the ways in which those affordances affect communication. With this in mind, I offer an example introductory assignment using William Blake’s “The Tyger” to help students gain a critical awareness of modal affordances. Utilizing Blakes poem, three versions of his etching, a choral version of the poem, and YouTube video of a dramatic reading of the poem, I analyze the ways in which meaning making is affected by changes in and juxtaposition of different modes. I suggest that this same kind of analysis could be conducted with students, helping them discover how different multimodal texts lead to different meanings and consider how the meanings could have been made clearer or made different.
