Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Guy Fawkes does not rhyme with Box

Even though I had a similar reaction to this week's reading as Jenn did (hmmm...boxes?), I thought it would be something I might like to incorporate into the classroom. The problem I was having was exactly how to incorporate it. Maybe it was just that any essay that references both Marcel Duchamp and Walter Benjamin is automatically going to scream for my attention, but I really found myself enjoying this reading. And having seen Anne Wysocki's job talk, I was not surprised to find an innovative definition of "text" and composition throughout the piece.

I think the best example assignment was what Sirc explained in the basic form of "found image x found text x student interpretation." In a way, this reminded me of Court's lesson plan from last week about music mashups and covering as a way to introduce proper citation. This box logic assignment would involve recognizing that the image and text are someone else's works, but the student impression would then logically incorporate the two "outside sources" into a new and synthesized text.

I could also see this basic form of box logic working to help students incorporate textual evidence into their papers in terms of analysis. I think that if the students collected a number of their own impressionistic responses to an image/text/song, this could help explain how to effectively analyze a quote in an essay. That is, knowing how to discover an informed impression (not just "this quote/image is weird," but "this quote/image reminds me of...") would encourage them not to just drop the author's text into their own paragraph text and assume their readers will understand what the quote means to their argument.

2 comments:

Leta said...

Are you sure "Fawkes" and "box" don't rhyme? It's at least a slant rhyme...

Katharine said...

Leta,

That soooo doesn't count as one of your two comments ;)