A flash fiction digital story I wrote/produced/submitted for the Center for Digital Storytelling's "Backstory" project. A summary from CDS's website: "Someone submits a photo, and we ask our readers to write and submit their 250-300 word BackStory – what they THINK the story behind the photo is... everything you can't see in the picture." For more info: storycenter.org/blog. (Script and audio licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. The clown image is copyrighted by Brooke Hessler: facebook.com/hb.hessler.) For more info: www.ryantrauman.net

Seeing Her Right Back

So let’s say you don’t have a ton of experience incorporating audiovisual elements into your writing classroom assignments. Let’s also say that maybe you are a little intimidated by the prospect not only because it is something new to you and your students, but also because your yourself are not sure what an audiovisual assignment might look like. How do you design an audio assignment where the adoption of new technologies and new practices doesn’t obfuscate the point of the assignment altogether? How do you design an assignment that still seems like a “writing assignment” in line with the traditional expectations that most students bring to a writing classroom, while simultaneously challenging those notions by incorporating alternative modes of composition and distribution? My advice...

Incorporating an Audio Assignment into your Classroom: The PSA

A pedagogy workshop facilitated by Harley Ferris & Ryan Trauman @ the University of Louisville, 11 April 2013.

In this workshop, we present an example assignment tailored specifically for First Year writing classes while discussing issues related to: the efficacy of audio assignments in first-year writing classrooms; how those assignments might be tailored to address specific course outcomes; how those assignments can be framed as highly rhetorical exercises; strategies for making the necessary resources available to students; possibilities for sharing/circulating/publishing audio assignments; and potential pitfalls for audio assignments in the writing classroom. And of course, we also spent some time at the end for Q&A.

An Apology for Audio Assignments in First-Year Writing Classrooms

Harley Ferris and I were recording a conversation for the Zeugma podcast out of DWRL at UT. We addressed this important question, but we couldn't fit it into the edited version of the conversation.

Are Audio Assignments "Essential" in the Writing Classroom? - Harley Ferris & Ryan Trauman Discuss

I sat down with Kathryn Perry, a PhD student studying Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, and a participant from the 2012 Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) at Ohio State University. One of the texts Kathryn produced at the institute was published by _Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy_. In the interview she reflects on her experiences at DMAC, her thoughts leading up to it, one of the texts she produced, and what it was like to have that text published by a peer-reviewed journal. She also remarks on the ways in which DMAC professionalizes participants, her experience of community while there, and a bit of advice for future attendees. And if you'd like to check out the text Kathryn published at Kairos, here's a link: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/17.1/disputatio/perry/

Reflecting on DMAC 2012 - An Interview with Kathryn Perry

You are five years old, and your mother forgot to let you out of the station wagon. So you opened the door and let yourself out. She's already up the porch and into the house. But this isn't your house. It's your aunt and uncle's. It's spring, and you hear a distant lawn mower. You're not sure if you should follow her in. An older woman in a flowered dress emerges from the house next door. And doesn't notice you. She crosses in front of the flowerbeds, carrying a foil-covered casserole dish, and slips into the house. You don't move. It's not that you can't. Or maybe it is that you can't. You just stand there. You know something is happening. Something that everybody else already knows. Something that doesn't care whether or not you're ready for it. 

A cat emerges deliberately from the bushes in front of you. Not hunting. Not called for. Just coming home. He pauses, turns his head, and looks at you. He senses something. Not about you, but about where you're headed. His eyes blink slowly. His ear twitches away a fly. You want him to stop looking at you. To stop feeling whatever it is he's feeling about you. 

You don't know it now, but you'll recognize this same look on your wife's face just before she tells you she has a lump in her breast. It'll come back to you when your parent's tell you they’re splitting up. You'll see it again in the bathroom mirror when you finally admit that you never became the father you'd promised. You don't yet know this look. Not at five years old. And that's why you shove your small fists into your pockets, look down at your grass-stained tennis shoes, and follow the cat into the house.

<em>(I wrote this piece in response to a friend's challenge to produce some sudden-fiction for a digital story. The picture is his. The fiction is mine.)</em>

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