Talking About Genre By Mapping Texts in Composition Courses
Purpose: I’ve used versions of this lesson in the various composition courses I’ve taught. It has quite a few access points for linking the lesson’s focus to whatever the course may need at that moment. For instance, I’ve used it to talk about genre (maps as genre, radio as genre/essay), dynamic observation (maps as a mode of observation and cataloging), building critical analysis (moving from observation to claims), and general research (gathering real world data and composing it into a visual form). The following is at a rough outline for what I use and some of the optional materials I have ready depending on time and/or the focus of that course.
Description: In this activity, students map rhetorical moves happening in a certain genre/text of This American Life. Not only do students map the episode but they also engage in a detailed discussion about the conventions of the genre, the design of the episode, and the purpose of approaching a topic through inquiry.
Suggested Time: A full day with the option to ask students to engage with the text being studied for homework.
Procedure: The course is centered around episode 110: Mapping produced by This American Life (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/mapping). The episode has a prologue and five sections corresponding to “mapping” using the five senses. I usually get to the prologue and the first one or two sections in class. They are the most useful, I’ve found. I will sometimes assign the rest of the sections for homework that corresponds to a discussion post.
Optional beginning exercise: I often start my classes with freewriting oriented prompts. If the course is long enough, I will start this class by having students “map” their “home.” I emphasize that they may map things in many different ways and they may consider their home many different things. This gives them some freedom to not only be creative, but use some conventions that will be productive in our class conversations later. (If I’m teaching a 50 min section, I skip this. I’m considering how I might split this into two days in the future to allow for this aspect to be included.)
Before playing the TAL episode, I generally have them prepare for what it will be like to listen to a radio broadcast unless we’ve encountered radio previous to this. I’ll ask them about their familiarity with radio, etc and then suggest they get out a pad and pen to take notes while the episode plays. I tell them we’ll stop along the way but to take notes on what they notice—here, what I suggest they “notice” depends in part on what our focus is. For this past class, I asked them to focus on what they noticed about the genre of radio and how it differs and is similar to our text-based essays. So, essentially, what’s going on with this radio format. I also asked them to look for moments in the prologue that relate to our essay introductions we just workshopped.
Then, we listen to the prologue straight through. We pause there and discuss (in this instance) what they noticed about this new genre. We generally end up discussing some of the obvious differences with speed, rate of information, musical cues, and of course, that it’s audible and how that affects us as listeners and what choices the creators are playing with in this medium. Often, I’ll steer them towards the musical cues as a method of structure and particularly the way in which it allows us to reflect on or prepare us for “claims” the radio essay is making. If we view these as markers, in a way, how can we determine what the prologue is doing as an introduction—how does it lay out an idea that will be explored in the rest of the sections?
I’ll often replay the part where Ira Glass makes this claim—musical cue starts around 2:16 and he begins at 2:22, makes the claim at 2:36 about why maps have meaning. I’ll usually see if anyone caught this “focal point” of the intro before I replay it. Another great thing I like mentioning is looking at why Ira Glass uses this story to introduce the episode. Usually we end up discussing how the man was affected by his job—how he walks around looking at all the sidewalks everywhere, even when he’s not working. It’s also handy to discuss how Ira Glass lays out this “roadmap” at the end of the introduction to let us know what’s to come—an idea we spent time on with our workshop on the functions and expectations of an essay introduction. This is a great example for them as well if you’re teaching an inquiry essay—an idea they sometimes struggle to understand. They want to make an argument or take a stance, but here we see that Ira is just exploring or inquiring about something in the world and then creating an essay to answer that question. Yes, he makes claims but they are not binary claims about how things should or shouldn’t be or what’s right or wrong (as they often understand “claims” to mean).
Next, we move on to the first section, “Sight,” which tells the story of a man who decided to map his neighborhood in various unconventional ways and assembled them into a book. TAL has a link to some of the maps, which I will open up and scroll through while we listen to this section. (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/Everything_Sings_Excerpt_and_Intro.pdf)
There’s a lot to do here, but I stop and discuss some of the early maps and try to get students to make a “claim” based on the “light spot” map—the idea here is to think about how we can use a simple observation and move to a larger claim, or piece of analysis, from that. So, in this instance, we think about a claim we can make based on this map using what we know about neighborhoods, lightness and darkness, etc. This ends up with us supposing, though we may be wrong, from just this one map, that the areas with more light are wealthier or more influential areas of this neighborhood. (This ends up being discussed later in the episode. The point here is that we can make claims and try them out from oftentimes very simple and basic observations. This is another point we work on early in the semester in an exercise wherein students make an observation about the classroom and move through reflection and then analysis to build a claim—a thing I look for in papers. For instance: “The desks all face one direction. This organization gives the room a sense of focus on the front, or whoever stands at the front. Because the teacher stands at the front, the desks are organized this way to impart a sense of authority on the teacher.”)
The episode continues with a great discussion on mapping pumpkins and their relation to wealth and influence. We then stop and try to build our own claims based on what the episode lays out by talking about why this connection exists and why carved pumpkins are a marker of wealth, something you might not normally expect. This leads us into a discussion on holidays as markers of affluence and holidays and cultural texts. Here I usually connect our observations on holidays back to the concepts we discuss in my class in relation to an article (https://msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html) by Horace Miner on the “Nacirema” or “Americans” backwards, a great anthropological parody that helps students step back and view our own culture from an outside perspective.
We try to look at holidays in this same manner while understanding how maps, as a form of specified observation, lead us to these reflections and analysis.
From here, you can move on to the second section, which provides a great story on mapping background noise with heavy links to possible discussions on the prevalence and effects of technology and machines in our lives, as well as furthering our understanding of audio-based texts as a genre.
When I’m low on time, I will stop before the second section and look at some outside texts discussing maps depending on where the discussion goes.
Potential supplemental materials:
A video from the West Wing that uses a map to form an argument (claim), interesting and engaging:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY (I like to pause this at the break in the video and have them try to build the “claim” that comes in the next section of the video, basically that maps like the one they show have a western bias that may affect how we view the relative importance of other countries based on perceived size/location). This is also a great point to discuss the power of map making—the power we have when we choose what information to display and how to display it.
A xkcd comic on those same map projections: https://xkcd.com/977/
I like to pass this book around while we listen to the episode (I happen to own a copy):
Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies (Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Introduction by Tom McCarthy)
One of my favorite mapping tools, though it will often take you into a big discussion, so I use this when I have time for a meaty discussion:
Seriously, such a great tool. It maps the entire US with dots based on race using census data. I use this to discuss how mapping is a tool to visual complicated ideas, or ideas we may not quite understand. So, we usually think that segregation is “over”—yet if you look at many US cities, there are clear lines of segregation, often down to a single street: think, Detroit. I show them Kansas City, where I’m from, which also is heavily divided by race along a single street. Chicago has a sunspear type segregation radiating out from downtown. I move around and look at the different cities people in the class are from. This is a great tool for accessing a larger discussion about race, modern segregation, racial injustices, the rhetoric of segregation and city planning, etc.
There are a lot of other things I’ll pull in from time to time. And these suggestions for the episode are by no means comprehensive. There’s a lot to unpack that I haven’t addressed here and you can reorient these materials to fit most purposes depending on what you want the focus of your class to be. I’m always happy to discuss these ideas and my own approach anytime!
Cheers.