Text passages for Hypothes.is discussion
Let's read and respond to the following passages together. To get started: Open the hypothes.is tab on the right edge of the browser and sign in.
Excerpt 1: Jody Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole
"Concerns were also raised about the way process theory had been applied 'en masse' in classrooms, with some alleging that the process movement had failed to fulfill the goal of empowering students. Instead of underscoring for students multiple ways of knowing and writing, it 'inculcate[d] a particular method of composing'—the idea being that the process taught depended largely on the product teachers expected to receive from students. Also of concern were that 'introspective heuristics' such as free writing and brainstorming led to a 'privatized economy of invention,' suggesting to students that writing began in the writer and not with his or her relationship with the world" (33).
****
Excerpt 2: Harmut Koenitz, et al, "Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN)-new way to represent complexity and facilitate digitally empowered citizens"
Indeed, scholars working on complexity have pointed out the need for “new narratives”. For the topic of history, Turina (2018) suggests that CAS representations present a “continuously changing interaction” which, due to its causality- feedback loop, needs “new narrative tools” (p. 124) that “narrat(e) the past from different points of view” (p. 126). This sentiment echoes Rejeski et al.’s insight that “complexity needs new narratives” (Rejeski et al., 2015). The characteristics of IDN match these requirements, enabling multiple perspectives (including conflicting views), continuous feedback, choices and consequences, emergence, and replay. Put succinctly, IDN offers representations of complex issues combined with a central human form of communication—narrative
An IDN empowers audiences as interactors but also requires them to make choices by picking perspectives and taking decisions. Every traversal of an IDN is a temporary, cognitive reduction of the complexity of the system in the form of a linear, self-directed narrative experience. It his way IDN enables comprehension without enforcing the need for the permanent reduction of presented material that is inherent in many traditional forms of representation such as the journalistic article.
Even a single traversal of an IDN creates an awareness of complexity, due to realisation that alternative paths and/or perspectives exists and have not been visited or explored yet. This is a powerful first step in creating a literacy for complexity through “complexity awareness” by effectively showing that any single narrative can be exhaustive in a complex situation. Furthermore, IDN facilitates replay and allows interactors to revisit their decisions, take a different route and explore a different perspective. Such repeat engagements enable increasing understanding of the complex phenomenon, by building upon the knowledge gained in earlier traversals. (pp. 86-87)
*****
Excerpt 3: Sharon Daniel, conclusion to "Hybrid Practices"
In my writing and my creative practice, I refuse to stand outside the context I provide. As a context provider, I am more immigrant than ethnographer, crossing over from the objective to the subjective, from the theoretical to the anecdotal, from authority (artist/ethnographer) to unauthorized alien. As an academic I was once reluctant to include my own story when theorizing my work. But my position is not neutral; in theory or in practice, that would be an impossible place. So I have crossed over into what theorists such as Jane Gallop and Michael Taussig call "the anecdotal," where theorizing and storytelling, together, constitute an intervention and a refusal to accept reality as it is. By employing a polyphony of voices, including my own, in order to challenge audiences to rethink the paradoxes of social exclusion that attend the lives of those who suffer from poverty, racism, and addiction, my work fulfills the role that new media documentary practices-practices of context provision - must play: empowering speech, changing perceptions, asking tough questions, and making radical demands. To understand my projects as works of art (or scholarship), one must move from questions of aesthetics (what is beauty?) or ontology (what is art?) to questions of pragmatism. In other words: what can art do? (159).
