Another Fear of Visual Rhetoric

Reading Westbrook's "Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear," I see another "fear" playing into instructors' decision to teach the production of visual rhetoric: the pressing fear of expectation. Ball State's English department actively encourages us to enter multimodal rhetorical worlds. But other institutions, which may not yet have a similar theoretical agenda, which may still, for instance, encourage the teaching of the analysis of literature as a means to improve students' academic writing, it may be daunting to consider teaching visual products for fear of what others looking in might say. Teaching students how to rhetorical view visual productions is easy enough to justify. It is easier to get students to see rhetorical features than it is to get students to read them. We also have Westbrook's reasoning, that it is appropriate in this consumer culture to show students how to critically examine the visual rhetoric that saturates them. But nonetheless, non-writing projects in a "writing" class may appear unwarranted and may be very hard to justify, depending on the goals established or intuited for composition classes at a particular institution.

Undergirding this is instructors' own ambivalence regarding the rhetorically visual productions, not only because of their lack of experience and knowledge about such products but also because of a concern for the academic quality of such productions. In other words, it is fairly easy for a composition instructor to see the academic value of writing, and for reasons intrinsic to the mode. The dense, explanatory nature of academic writing means that an instructor is much more likely to "see" the critical thinking in a student's written work. In effect, writing explicitly "demonstrates" critical thinking. In visual productions, this can be harder to see since the student is not describe a thought process while arguing her points or persuading her audience. Thus, any given visual observation could be critical thinking or it could be a fluke, a notion that the instructor sees but that the student just stumbled upon. Not to mention, of course, many instructors likely equate valid academic work as written work. And, again, this isn't an unwarranted assumption. The vast majority of academic work is written, and frankly will remain so for a long time to come (I can imagine the result if I attempting to hand in a multimodal dissertation, or even one that wasn't printed and bound). It is hard to put aside such a value, even if you know better. It is harder when faced with a student body who will more than likely have to write in order to demonstrate their knowledge and critical abilities in their fields.