Case Studies

In presenting this assignment sequence through self-generated case study examples, this project embodies a value of “making as knowing.” This design was partly determined by necessity; due to institutional constraints, I was unable to include examples of student work in my research. However, like Delagrange, I am deeply “convinced of the importance of making as an epistemological act, the importance of visual and other kinds of evidence as necessary to a full and fruitful epistemic space, and the necessity of embodiment as an ethical condition of the making and the made,” and that it is important for teachers and scholars writing about composing in multiple media channels to perform such work themselves. Furthermore, I agree with Smart that as instructors “we need to interrogate the beliefs we espouse in both the real and rhetorical situations we share with our students” (22). In working to engage religious literacies in the classroom, we too are part of the “process of ‘keeping company’ with [our students] in the pursuit of an unforeseen but common truth” (Spellmeyer 266); in serving as mentors and models for this process, we too risk “the dangers of [a] conversation” as “a drama of change and discovery, an event of language” that is “intimate, precarious, and unsophisticated” (266-267). It is in such a spirit that I offer these examples as potential models for composition instructors interested in using the DALN to engage religious literacies.

In creating these examples, I focus on four narratives not of my tradition (Catholic Christian) that lend themselves to remediation well across differing media formats (so as to show a range of examples for students): one Kriyaban, one Muslim, one Jewish, one spiritual—one poem, one audio file, one image, one video. I used a keyword search to find all the literacy narratives specifically tagged “religion.” Another keyword would have yielded different results, such as “spirituality” or “faith” or “belief” or “sacred”; I chose “religion” in order to work with a “vernacular religion” framework based on how the narrators are defining/interpreting the word “religion”, and also in order to facilitate an emphasis on concrete material traditions rooted in historical practice and symbol systems, rather than abstract belief. My selection methods in choosing the narratives to remediate do not necessarily represent the entirety of the religious literacy narratives available in the DALN, much less the entirety of the DALN. However, they represent one way of navigating this large archive of sources that might be useful for students so as not to get completely lost, and to productively find a few useful sources to work with.

The following examples include both the original literacy narrative file and my remediation, along with a brief contextualization; the reporting, reflection, and research stages are included in an appendix at the end. I encourage readers to listen to/watch source narrative first, then the remediation, then reflection and response (?)—to slow down and take time with engaging the different media forms, just as the assignment sequence encourages students to slow down and take time in listening carefully and critically to the source narrator’s story.