Inspiration and themes
My pedagogical experiment is inspired by Ulmer’s mystory (2003), which embodies his desire to create a framework for working in digital spaces. The Internet is for him ‘a medium that puts us in a new relation to writing’ (2), and since the traditional literacy does not suffice in the new circumstances, he devises ‘electracy’, which entails novel strategies like linkage, collage, juxtaposition and above all image reasoning. In his opinion, this new digital literacy emphasises ‘the individual state of mind within which knowing takes place’ (Ulmer, 2003 in Bayne 2004:307) while writing with images, both pictorial and verbal, necessitates ‘an understanding of the atmosphere and aura evoked by things’ (Ulmer, 2003:56). Thanks to that there is room in his educational project for the expressive, aestheticism and affect, which are not commonly associated with the traditional academic practices (Toohey, 1999). Ulmer actively engages the student in pondering the human question by asking them to explore their identity, defined as ‘the simulacrum of the unknown of any field knowledge’ (2003 in Bayne, 2004:307), and to search for ‘an image of wide scope’ which approximates one’s dominant life pattern, thus foregrounding reflexivity and self-directed learning. This might be regarded as an engaging prospect for students, especially when other benefits are taken into account, for example the way mystory serves to enhance individual and collective creativity by fostering associative ‘lateral’ reasoning and problem-posing and –solving. This is possible because visual syntax follows a different logic, oriented toward relationality and synchronicity (Kress, 2005), allowing this way unexpected conceptual links to be forged unlike a conventionally structured text which imposes processing information in a linear and logical fashion, often preventing the unexpected (Csikszentmihalyi ,1996).
All in all, imagistic and hypertextual writing orients the student toward interrelations, overlaps and recursive patterns, highly ‘creativogenic’ features (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Ulmer 2003) which I see as a potentially generative learning opportunity for some of my prospective students since, speculatively, there might be parallels between the focus on relationality and the Chinese identity traditionally being grounded in the four core relationships (Connor, 1996). Visualisation and exploring oneself in relation to one of the main domains might be better aligned to the Chinese perspective of subjectivity and so facilitate the transformation across some of the boundaries described at the beginning. Additionally, the explicit focus on innovation and creative thinking also resonates with the Graduate Attributes Matrix mentioned earlier.
However, attractive as it is, I do not blindly reproduce Ulmer’s mystory in my professional circumstances. Apart from being guided by Basho’s advice, I believe the conceptual complexity of the project, rooted in numerous references to the theories of culture, rhetoric or art, is possibly impenetrable for a learner with less than advanced language competence. Dismissing it altogether creates a risk that the ensuing exploration might be lacking in depth and breadth and turn into an uncritical image search on the web. In order to salvage the situation, the student is asked to maintain a reflective blog where more guidance is offered by tutors and peers. Moreover, the student selects more accessible texts themselves to enrich their personal visualisation with an academic commentary. This way the student themselves, their identity, personality, feelings to do with transposition into a new culture become a subject of an academic enquiry the student themselves pursues. This story-within-a-story is also intended as a ploy to demonstrate the stylistic duality, an attempt to address the issue raised by the student in the vignette.
The next section is about the approach to course design.