I’ve been using this blog in my visual studies and art courses this semester to log my reflections, inspirations, and record my ideas for various projects. This blog is intended to be an archive of information for me to look at in my future semesters and see how I’ve developed as a student and artist, so I felt that it was a sufficient medium for communicating with myself in the future. As an art major at St. Edward’s who’s always had an interest in creative writing and analyzing literature, I have always really liked my english classes. But now that I’m in college and it’s time to be all academic and professional about my work, I have different questions than I had at the beginning of the semester that I’m hoping my future experiences at St. Edward’s will answer for me. Since this is the last technical writing course I’ll be taking, my thoughts and concerns about writing have more to do with writing and research within the art major, and less with how to write for Rhetoric and Composition. I’ve learned a lot about writing this semester. I could probably give you a plethora of answers to the questions, “What are you even gonna use rhetoric for, anyway?” and “How do you write like an academic?” I’ve learned how to read academic writing, read about academic writing, think about academic writing, and I’m hopeful that I’ve learned how to write it. (Not 100% on that one, but we are our harshest critics, right?) I hope to find these answers at some point in my college career and be able to come back to this creative and reflective blog site to see the transformations I have made over time. So let’s get on with it! First, I’ll address myself.
Yo, Chlo! How do you find the gap in the conversation about the topic you plan to write about?
At the beginning of this class, I can remember feeling a little panicked when thinking about research and how it often felt like I was starting writing projects with nothing and with no direction. One of my questions in my Writng Project 1 was about how to start with nothing in the initial research process of a researched based writing project. I remember thinking that once I had a topic, I would be unsure of what direction to take as far as finding valuable sources and incorporating them into my project, along with the ideas I wanted to include. In our class this semester, we have used a variation of research tools and methods for gathering and organizing information. These have helped me realize that there is a strategy for research. Surprise! It begins with pre-search and finding out who my audience is for the writing I’m about to do. I learned how useful pre-search was in our Information Literacy Sessions because we had a set time in which we would explore our topic and find sources that would help us build credibility in saying what I had to say about writing in the arts. But even after the research process begins, its hard to know what information your audience needs that others haven’t already written about. When you sit down to research and get an idea of what others have said about the topic you’re interested in learning about, think about what kind of ethos you need to establish with your intended audience. There should always be a gap in order for your information to matter to your audience, it’s just a matter of exploring enough to know what that is and create a legit argument. This will lead you to the missing link that academic writing is meant to fulfill.
Now, for the questions I will need a little help answering:
Dr. Rodenborn, if I want to do a creative presentation for my honors thesis during my last semester at St. Edward’s, how would I incorporate evidence from my research and what kinds of writing would I need to accompany this project?
I know honors theses revolve around some sort of thesis. Duh! But the genres we saw presented in the honors symposium were really unique and related heavily to the student’s major and creative preference in presenting their information. The two presentations I saw at the Honors Thesis Symposium were plays, and each of these students could only present one scene from their play to their audience because of time constraints. This led to a time for the audience to ask questions to fill in the gaps of the play’s purpose and message. Despite the small exerpt they were able to show, it was obvious the writing they did for the project improved their ability to explain their topic and exigence, and communicate the information that their creative presentation couldn’t get across in that short period of time.
I’d like to be creative and use the knowledge about art and my particular interests that I’ve gained over my years at St. Ed’s in presenting my thesis. I’m wondering, when it comes time to propose my thesis and research, if I will have to do immense amounts of convincing, explaining, and establishing ethos in order for my thesis project to . I know this depends on my choice of medium for presenting my thesis and how well I communicate my purpose through that medium, I’d just like to know what the preparation process is like in terms of the kind of writing I will have to do so I can better prepare myself and choose my thesis wisely. I also know that it’s really early in the game to ask this, but I started thinking about it when I was preparing my final presentation for this class.
In my Writing Project 4, being an art student and gearing my genres toward fellow art majors, I wanted to communicate the role of writing in our major and various career paths in a very creative way that would resonate well with artistic minds. While I really enjoyed channeling my research and insights through creative mediums, it was really challenging to condense my information into genres that my audience would interact with only for a short period of time. I almost felt like they wouldn’t communicate sufficiently on their own, especially since they were more conceptual and needed a little more explaining. The fact that we had to do about the same amount of writing, in explaining and reflecting on our genres, as we did in the research paper for WP3, shows me now that I may have a lot of explaining to do if I choose a creative pathway for presenting my honors thesis. I’d like to know how intensive the writing has to be in comparison with the actual content of my presentation, and how would I effectively use my research in my final product.
Hey Visual Studies professors, what is considered “academic research” in the visual art major change and how does that change from project to project?
In my little bit of experience so far, the common view of the art major is that it is generally unassociated with academic writing and research. I quickly realized that this wasn’t true once I chose to write about the many uses for writing in the arts in my Writing Project 3. I talked about this in light of being a student artist working toward eventually being a professional in the creative field. The writing I have done for my art and design classes this semester has been mostly reflection blog posts, kind of like this one, and artist statements that we present when our work gets critiqued. In Writing Project 3, although it involved developing practice in the arts, it discussed how to create higher quality work and build artist identity through the strategy of writing reflectively. My point is, the writing I did about this topic was still about writing, and not just art, which meant the sources I found were written by academics in the visual studies field who conducted studies and used theoretical learning to help students in their creative processes.
In constrast with this research process, is the little bit of extra research I conducted for my Writing Project 4 genres. One of the mediums I used for communicating my information about writing in visual art, was a layered collage. (I’ve provided a link if you’d like to check it out!) The research for this was really casual and didn’t feel very academic. I searched things like “educational collage” and “interactive collage” in Google images and found some examples that helped inform the creating of my own interactive and educational collage. I’m enrolled in a new class next semester, in which a group of art students will be creating an installation piece about the Holocaust for the Bullock Texas State History Museum here in Austin. When I was invited to enroll in the class, I was told that we’d be doing research about the Holocaust and the symbolism of butterflies commonly used for this time in history. In this course, and through this cool new experience, I would like to discover what true academic research means on the professional level in the arts, and if there should be any guidelines for sources or material that art majors use in their work. I’m not sure at this point if there is a definite line, in visual art, between academic research and just material that provides inspiration and concepts to help in creating impactful work. I’m wondering, for future personal and school related projects, how the research process translates over into other creative subjects besides writing.
This semester has been a whirlwind of theorizing and researching, but through the stress and sometimes painful amount of reading, thinking, and writing my butt off, I’m really glad I’ve come to realize that I am now a part of the academy. The work I’ve been doing from the beginning of the semester has built up to now, the very moment I am typing these words, in which I recognize how much I know, how much I don’t know, and how much I am seeking to learn. I have faith that my unique experiences here on the Hilltop in my courses and working with students and professors, will bring me to all of these answers, and I hope that there is room left for questions in my mind after every endeavor I encounter in my future St. Edward’s career. I’ll leave myself, and any anticipated readers of this blog, with the song that got me through Rhetoric & Composition II. Now that I’ve made it through this course, I can remind myself to always go back to the foundation and theory I’ve built around academic research and writing over the semester. Most importantly, I can remind myself, “DON’T PANIC!”