During Jeff Rice’s recent visit to the Center for Writing Studies, he met with current instructors of the Center’s Writing Across Media class for breakfast and conversation at Courier Café. Over always-amazing eggs and hash browns, WAM instructors Annie Kelvie, Katherine Flowers, and Kaia Simon shared our approaches and experiences teaching WAM with one of the scholars whose scholarly work influences the course.
Professor Rice also visited Kaia Simon’s section of WAM, where the students discussed Heidi McKee’s “Sound Matters” and analyzed the rhetorical uses of the elements of sound in film and audio examples students brought in to class. He talked with the class about the role of digital composition in their current lives and intended careers and participated in the class discussion of audio examples.
At breakfast, we connected the Advocacy Project incorporated by some WAM instructors to Professor Rice’s social media class in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Professor Rice asks his students to create effective social media campaigns, thinking about networking across platforms and media. One takeaway for us in WAM is to ask students to consider the rhetorics of hashtags in social media. Professor Rice shared his approaches to asking students to develop ‘sticky’ hashtags for their campaigns—that the best hashtags are specific, tell a story, and require some work, some knowledge, some enthymatic reasoning on the part of readers the audience. This is why #ConcernedStudent1950 and #BlackLivesMatter are a more effective hashtags to organize a social media campaign than, say, #Academia.
WAM instructors are happy to have the opportunity to learn from (and eat Courier breakfast with!) Professor Rice. We can already imagine additional layers of framing to enhance the Advocacy Project.
#WAM!
(Think that one will stick?)
