Students Who Teach Us

I have decided to focus this week’s blog on Cynthia Selfe’s article: “ Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of A New Media Text Designer”. Her argument is that “ teachers of composition should not only be interested in new media texts but should be using them systematically in their classrooms to teach about new literacies”. (44).  She tells that story of Davis Damon and how it teaches us how to understand literacy in the twenty-first century. David’s story is to help us realize how literacy and composition relates to the new form of media texts.

David Damon begins in Detroit; he is an African American boy whose family was poor. He never knew his father and the family moved around a bit, Florida where he started to attend school as he describes as a “beauty school”(45). His mother then became a drug addict, she was unable to care for him and he was moved into neighbors home and then back with his mom and then back to Michigan. He continued to move around a bit more, Ohio and California. David did like school and he picked up his mother’s habit of reading, “there was never a lack of books at the house”. (46)

As the story continues, when he started high school he had a grade average of 1.5 and his cousin told him that if he did not have a 3.0 grade average that he would not be allowed to hangout with him. So he made the decision to apply himself harder and soon he did have a 3.0 and as he describes “it became addictive”. (47) David initially encounter computers as a young student in Elementary School, he played games on them. But in high school computer were part of his life until he got into college, he hard a hard time at first but because his major required him to use them he had to learn how to use them.

After joining a Black fraternity in 1999, he started to spend more time on computers, using the Internet and then later on he became very interested in Web design. He basically taught himself Web design by copying codes and playing around with it. At the time Of Cynthia Selfe’s interview with Davis in 2000 “ he was confident in using several word-processing applications packages like Microsoft Word to compose documents. Web Chat to speak with others synchronously on the World Wide Web”. (49)

Despite all of this he eventually failed out of school because he could not put together a traditional essay with basic literacy skills that included Standard English, development and spelling. There are several lessons David’s story teaches us about literacy and media. Even though David taught himself web design and other applications in the new form of literacy, his traditional understanding of composition was lacking.

He formed a new identity with computers and composition but as the author points out, “ at least inn part because of his online identity and through his composition if new media texts-has voted on his literacy allegiances”. (53) David did not understand the traditional form of literacy in print. He had no spelling skills and could not meet the standards.

 

The article brings up the idea that teachers have to expand their knowledge beyond the tradioal ways of composition in order for students to learn and understand new forms of media texts. There are challenges that are ahead for teachers and students to break away from the conventional forms of what is considered the standard and open up to the new forms of media and texts and how they are composed.