Kathleen Yancey's "Re-desiging Graduate Education in Composition and Rhetoric"

The exogenesis of Yancey’s article on re-designing English graduate education is that she stepped into an opportunity to envision a new graduate program in rhetoric and composition at Florida State University. With the untimely deaths of Wendy Bishop and Rick Straub, the program was receptive for a new direction, but Yancey and the faculty had not yet determined that direction.

As I read this article, I naturally began to consider our own recent English program creation and inception as we became BYU-Idaho. Ours was a rare opportunity to develop a new program without pre-conceived structure and restrictions. It is rewarding to see that some of our choices in creating BYU-Idaho’s undergraduate English program mirror some of what Yancey and others created at Florida State University.

Yancey begins by discussing the concept of remixing. At first I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I’ve gathered that remixing is nothing more than the combining of alternative versions, ideas, narratives, sources, mediums, genres, and approaches to reexamine and rethink their program. So our university’s long-standing principle of “rethinking education” meshes with the philosophy of taking the traditional and reworking it with new or alternate approaches to establish a new program. BYU-Idaho’s reworking of general education into Foundations, is an ongoing example of remixing.

Yancey emphasizes that the remixing of the traditional/classical/tried approaches or subjects is a means of invention and creativity—the creation of new texts, new curricula, and new programs.

Yancey and her colleagues took the traditional courses of composition theory, rhetorical theory, and research methodologies and remixed them with visual rhetoric, digital revolution, and cultural convergence which resulted in a program strong in both traditional rhetoric threaded with technologies and multimodalities.

Yancey stresses “whenever we create curricula we build on other curricula” which becomes a form of remixing. So their traditional rhetoric courses are now incorporating in all classes blogs, multimedia, electronic literature, visual rhetoric, electronic portfolios, Web 2.0, and cyberliteracies in addition to guest speakers, student presentations and symposiums, peer study groups, and digital workshops within digital centers.

Two related questions they ask within the new core course Digital Revolution and Convergence Culture include: (1) “what difference does technology, especially digital technologies, make in the ways that we write, the ways that we read, and the ways that knowledge is made, sanctioned, and shared?”(2) “what do these changes related to digital technology mean for those of us who teach reading, literature, and writing, now and in the future?”

These two questions demonstrate how they have remixed the traditional with what they anticipate will be the future.

I see the same in what BYU-Idaho’s English program has done specifically with English 252, English 321, English 450, and English 495. We just haven’t incorporated technology into the courses, but we have tried to anticipate the needed skills our students must possess to be successful in a fast changing job market—for most of our students, their careers will depend on their abilities to integrate, challenge, and create new genres, mediums, modalities to meet the demands of professional and public written, visual, and oral communication.

Yancey agrees with Carl Raschke’s declaration in The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (2003) that today’s world is in the midst of a “third human transformation. The first was the invention of language, the second the invention of writing, and the third the invention of digital spaces.”

Like Yancey, I see that BYU-Idaho’s program has benefited from the “remixing” that occurred as we created our new program, improving upon a traditional program, our program has begun to be evident through similar changes at other institutions nationally, and our program has demonstrated that we represent a “generation of change,” built on a previous generation as we prepare the way for a future generation.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Re-designing Graduate Education in Composition and Rhetoric: The Use of Remix as Concept Material, and Method.” Comput Med Imaging Graph (2008), doi: 10.1016/j.compcom.2008.11.004.