A Practicum in TESOL: Professional Development through Teaching Practice Book

From the get-go, Jeff Rice has some explaining to do, because, honestly, "who would think to associate composition studies and cool?" (18). Rice shifts the focus of composition studies away from the print medium and towards the under-researched digital media my modifying tradition into a more overlapping "mixed" form of electronic writing. Rice claims that the rhetoric of cool conveys the message that composition is something more than words on a page, further asserting ways that digital media allow for a kaleidoscopic involvement with electronic writing in the digital age, with the practical application involving mostly the composition of Webpages. While Rice's ideas do maintain the importance of outside cultural circulatory influences in the writing classroom, I find the rhetoric of cool a little too cool for the reality in which the practical values must have an effect.
The Rhetoric of Cool is meant to be an eye-opening approach for all professional participants active in the area of composition studies and can be useful to each one in different contexts, some more than others: theorists, scholars, instructors, and policy makers. Rice provides a new attempt that would, more or less, completely reorganize the field of composition studies as a computer/Web based approach that creates referential relationships between what is more or less hodgepodgical ideas. Rice calls for a complete about face by leaving the fetishized print medium behind for an all-digital format for composition. In regards to first-year writing, Rice's rhetoric is beyond the reality that it must come face to face with. Considering that he heavily emphasizes William S. Burroughs, the DJ, and Blue Note jazz album covers as vital examples of representation for his rhetoric, the former world of composition-as-writing is theoretically being replaced by virtual-Web-composition. Rice's practical application of cool could easily be cross-sectioned with a graphic design class as he proposes that the students' writing consist of composing web pages and iconoclastic image association projects (on a website, still), with the effect weighing heavily on hyperlink association. With grave emphases on appropriation, juxtaposition, and non-linearity, I feel like Rice's approach would better suit the more experience student who has a more directed idea as to where her writing instruction is going to lead her (i.e., the interactive world of digital media).
For the sake of its distinctive approach to writing, Rice's rhetorical strategy of writing cool could be useful for graphic designers who work in the digital mass media. Anyone from a magazine editor to a website designer could take note of his varying use of image association and his appropriation of Gregory Ulmer's idea of "choral writing," which "organizes any manner of information by means of the writer's specific position in the time and space of a culture" (34). Rice himself emphasizes the importance of imagery and pushes for the move out of the relentless hold of print media, convinced that the digital media will provide the open-endedness that words on a page no longer offer its reader. What I find to be most concerning is how this approach to composition pedagogy will affect those students who first want to learn how to write in the traditional form. Since the process of learning how to compose words on any page (Web page, notebook page, or the classis Sketch Pad) is an ongoing process, it seems as if leaving behind the traditional linearity of writing will cheat students out of the basic knowledge of how to order things and compose coherent pieces of writing. Rice's composition mixology circles around William S. Borough's cut-and-paste approach to writing, a "rhetoric of resistance to political and economic structures" (75), I believe that it is far more important for students to learn the structure of establishments before they have the know-all to subvert that which is established. His metaphor of writer-as-DJ brings this problem to the forefront as well. Rice offers Afrika Bambaataa as an example, noting how the artist acquired a vast record collection that "functioned as the basis for future compositions" (66). Bambaataa, first, had to establish a basis of profound knowledge for the already pre-established compositions that came before him before he has the capacity to appropriate, juxtapose, and commutate his mixes in a way that produces the new meaning. While Rice brings the traditional critiques into his new text, he seems to leave tradition in the dark when it comes to the writing process.
An overtly obvious subtext of Rice's Rhetoric of Cool is its stress on the Web as the new paper and all that it encompasses (Weblogs, Wikis, Websites, etc.) as the new direction of composition studies. Rice directly and explicitly subverts most traditional values in his chapter layout: chora, appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity(?), and imagery. While these elements still do play conventional roles in the traditional approach to composition, Rice emphasizes these elements as the basis. While now, one purpose for composition is to build the student's ability to coherently construct their ideas in a form that is professional, valid, and readable, Rice's proposal has the student becoming a DJ, mixing and matching seemingly unrelated ideas (mostly images) into a coherent (yet non-linear) composition that allows for more open-ended interpretation. While this is all well and good, it is a drastic measure in regards to professionalism in the English discipline. While focusing on Weblogs and Wikis will allow the students to become more open-minded to the idea of what composition really is, Rice's approach is not only utopian (that the English discipline will equate Web site composition to essay/genre composition) but it also reeks of other problems: economics (computers in every classroom), student requirements (freshmen constructing/composing websites?), and the digital faculties of instructors (the know-how of Web building). While the effort and work put forth to make writing 'cool' is by all means admirable, Rice's approach can be considered a stepping stone into a full-on launch into the pedagogically digitized future where everyone, before entering college as a freshman, already knows, participates in, and values Website construction as a form of composition viable for requirements in the English discipline.