Thinking inside the box

Reading Joseph Janangelo’s piece, I thought about my brother, who will be a high school senior next year. I remembered how he has engaged with literature throughout grade school. Janangelo’s description of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, his collages, seems like sophisticated version of the mobile my brother made several years ago in response to Beverly Clearly’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Of course, I expect Janangelo to praise my brother’s project to an even lesser extent than he appreciated the two persuasive hypertexts submitted by his students. And why shouldn’t he? My brother’s project was a child’s composition, which would be inappropriate for an assignment in a college course.
My brother is a crafty and artistic person, who thinks and learns best when he can engage with the material in a tactile way. I think he could compose a more thought-out, more effective, more successful, more persuasive argument through hypertext or collage than through an essay. Although I do not think he has the computer savvy at this time to create a persuasive hypertext, I do believe that if he had the necessary skills, the way he thinks would allow him to succeed where Janangelo’s students failed.
This is all just to say that I think some students in English 1000 might better learn to use argument if their instructors encouraged them to try to be persuasive in different media. This is a hard lesson for some English 1000 instructors—especially me. The way I think expresses itself best through writing. So, teaching students to be persuasive in other media would be difficult for me. I wish Janangelo had written more about how to teach students argument using hypertexts, as well as other media.