http://www.wide.msu.edu/conference/Cushman_WIDE.pdf
Ellen Cushman
Citizen of Cherokee Nation, Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
cushmane@msu.edu
An expanded version of this paper was published in Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Community Literacy, and Service Learning. Volume 4.3 (Spring 2006): 254-70.

Abstract
A praxis of new media unfolds at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies in order to produce transformative knowledge products with all stakeholders. To illustrate this praxis of new media, I will show the results of a collaborative between MSU and the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma in which educational materials are produced with and for the Cherokee Nation. This collaborative depends upon MSU students enrolled in WRA 417: Multimedia Writing, a project-based professional writing course. Students in this class read hundreds of pages related to the Cherokee Nation's history, write research papers that form the content of the site, and learn two software packages in order to create educational interactive media with and for the Cherokee Nation. These materials are then launched on the Nation's website and distributed on CD during the Cherokee National holiday.

Using a multiliteracies framework, I will point to the designs of meaning and material capacities necessary to develop and sustain this work. I show how this collaborative builds upon the capacities already present within the Cherokee Nation as it challenges the resources and capacities of the university. I argue that particular alignments of material and intellectual resources must be in place for a praxis of new media to be sustainable and build stakeholders' capacities.

Introduction
Over the last decade, I’ve been developing a praxis of new media at intellectual and pedagogical intersections where community, critical, and digital literacies meet. As part of this praxis of new media, I have taught a service learning based, multimedia writing course that has been built around the purposes and audiences community members found important. At times, this project based community service course has suffered from a lack of resources and institutional support; other times it has suffered because it failed to build the capacity of community organizations.

However, when the institutional, community, and curricular support aligned, the possibilities for student learning, activist research, and community service were realized in a third space of possibility. In this space of possibility, ideally all stakeholders gain from the collaboration according to their needs and the process delivers a set of compositions not possible had any of the stakeholders chosen the route of individual learning, isolated research and teaching, or mutual alienation. When stakeholders are engaged in mutually beneficial collaboration that results in the creation of shared knowledge products, the process is transformative for stakeholders as well as for their audiences, who can potentially benefit from the knowledge products the collaborative produced. In reality, though, the space of possibility in which a praxis of new media unfolds is hard won, dependent upon multiple alignments of resources, ways of thinking, and institutional structures, and thus, it is quite difficult to sustain.

In this paper, I describe the Cherokee Nation|MSU collaborative and the course Multimedia Writing to suggest how these enact a praxis of new media. A praxis of new media is a theoretical and pedagogical framing of the ways in which community, critical, and digital literacies can be transformative for the stakeholders who engage them. In the remainder of this essay, I will describe this framework and demonstrate how a praxis of new media unfolds. I find that it is possible to work at the intersections of community, critical, and digital literacies; however, the alignments of material and cultural resources, social practices, and evaluation systems that must be forged and maintained on such a large scale explain why so many fledging community literacy initiatives fail, particularly those that involve the creation and distribution of multimedia deliverables.

The MSU | Cherokee Nation Collaborative
In collaboration with representatives of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma (CNO), Michigan State University students enrolled in Multimedia Writing and I developed a website and CD titled The Allotment in Cherokee History 1887-1914 (www.cherokee.org/allotment). This collaboration began when I was awarded tenure and was finally poised to begin the study I had always wanted to do: ethnography of Cherokee culture, technology use, and identity. As an outlander citizen of the tribe, I grew up being Indian but not able to participate in important social practices with other Cherokee. To begin this study, I got the name from an Eastern Cherokee of someone I should contact in Oklahoma. She said I could use her name with him, and with that connection, I screwed up my courage to meet Sammy Still at the 2004 Cherokee National Holiday. He showed me the kinds of digital mediations the tribe was undertaking in order to reach its citizens. In one effort, the Nation has developed and delivers, free to the public, a series of online language classes taught by those fluent in Cherokee. In Fall 2004, I enrolled in Cherokee I taught by Sammy Still and Ed Fields whom I had also met at the holiday. Sammy was the course administrator and long time insider to both the North Carolina and Oklahoma branches of the tribe. He and I wrote e-mails often outside of class, exchanging stories and ideas for cultural preservation. I asked if he thought maybe my students at MSU and I could do a multimedia project with and for the Cherokee Nation. He introduced me to Tonia Williams, Webmaster of the Cherokee nation, and Dr. Gloria Sly, the Director of the Cherokee Cultural Resources Center. I described some possible projects to Tonia and Gloria, and they saw a place where we could begin. Richard Allen, the Policy Analyst for the Nation joined the collaborative soon after.

Together, we agreed that educational materials about three main periods in Cherokee history were needed: Laws and Treaties leading to the Removal and Civil War (1700-1880), the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887-1914, and the Relocation Period (1930-present). To create these sites, my students and I read hundreds of pages of legislation, treaties, senate reports, pioneer papers, and tribal histories as well as collect and analyze drawings, videos, advertisements, documentaries, and photographs. Throughout the semester, we meet with Tonia, Gloria, Richard, and with Ben Phillips who authors many of the tribe’s online interactive sites. Through videoconference and in e-mail, we discuss our progress on interface design and content delivery and secure their continued blessings on this work. This project-based professional writing course has students learning two software packages in order to create educational interactive media that extend the already considerable digital delivery capacities of the Cherokee Nation (www.cherokee.org). The Cherokee Nation launched the first installment of this project on their website during their national holiday, held on Labor Day weekend each year, and we’re in the process of developing two more installations. (www.cherokee.org/allotment).

This particular course is not at all unique in that it has the typical layers of institutional, curricular, and social complexities that have been well documented in research on service-learning in rhetoric and composition (Deans; Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Flower, Long and Higgins; Carrick, Himley, and Jacobi; Herzberg; Flower “Partners,” “Problem Solving”; Peck, Flower, and Higgins; Bacon; Coogan; Cushman ”Contact,” “Service Learning,” “Sustainable,” Guest editor, “The Public”; Schutz and Gere). More difficult to understand are the ways that working at the intersections of community, critical, and digital literacies in a service-learning/new media course places demands on the institutional and disciplinary structures that students and professors inhabit. These demands point to both the persistent challenges in teaching service-learning courses, and one way in which notions of literacy, disciplinary boundaries, and university infrastructures shift to accommodate such work. To understand how this course works institutionally, a theoretical framework is needed that can, at least in part, help describe what kinds of composing, curricular, and institutional capacities are needed. In what follows, I outline a praxis of new media, discuss the course Multimedia Writing in relation to it, and show the types and levels of institutional support necessary to sustain community literacy projects that involve new media composing.

A Praxis of New Media
A praxis of new media is a theoretical and pedagogical framing of the ways in which community, critical, and digital literacies when combined in community literacy initiatives can be transformative for those who engage them. Stakeholders in this model can include, teachers, students, community and workplace members, and scholars. A praxis of new media works from three premises:

1. All stakeholders have knowledge, critical awareness, and important perspectives on the social problems being addressed;
2. High-end technologies and multimedia texts need to be interrogated—and produced—with stakeholders;
3. A flexibly structured inquiry and problem solving approach to research and curriculum, one that applies knowledge from various disciplines, can help students address problems that community members have identified.

A praxis of new media can be understood as an expansion of the Designs of Meaning and kinds of pedagogical practices described in the New London Group’s “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” and their later book on this topic, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. In this work, the authors bring together an interdisciplinary understanding of language and literacy to describe what they call “designs,” or those flexibly structured social organizations, knowledge bases, and cultural practices that influence daily meaning making practices and life chances. One aspect of the multiliteracies framework includes the Designs of Meaning that writers and readers use when creating meaning. These Designs of Meaning include the means of available designs (e.g. the tools, grammars, and media used); the designing process; and the re-designed product. For all its merits, the Designs of Meaning in a theory of multiliteracies has one weakness: it conceives of the social dimension of meaning making rather narrowly, seeing it mostly in terms of the immediate social context in which literacy events unfold. It lacks a sense of audience and the socio-cultural exigencies that influence meaning making. In short, it needs rhetoric.

Designs of Meaning in a Praxis of New Media
Means of available designs Available designs, in addition to being discursively based, are also about the tools for meaning making (sign systems, media, and computer technologies). It includes the ethical use, access to, and distribution of these tools: who owns them, who uses them, and for what ends. This is praxis of design that concerns itself with the means of knowledge production.

Locus for designing The work performed on available designs is in the service of all stakeholders. Questions addressed include: Where are these designs working? For whom? In what ways are available designs valued and by whom? What types of social, institutional, and physical networks are working in the layered locations of design? This is a praxis of designing.

Rhetoric of the re-designed Who are the audiences for designing? What are the purposes of designing? What are the ethical and social exigencies driving designing? What are the ethical and social ramifications intended and realized by this process. The praxis of production and delivery.

A praxis of new media expands upon the means of available designs to include notions of civic responsibility to our audiences, ethical writing for a public good, and transformed action that leads to the betterment of social groups and communities in addition to individual student learning. A praxis of new media adds rhetorical purpose as well as ethical, invited intervention into the process and products of creating within the designs of meaning. In doing so, it attends to audience and considers how we teach, learn, and research with audiences beyond the school and university in order to facilitate goals that community members and organizations deem important. The means of available designs expanded in this class to include a sense of the ways in which tools for production of meaning come to be jointly used and distributed. Students typically use the available designs in processes geared toward production for teachers alone. But in this case, students were asked by the Nation to follow a “share, learn, share” model of information distribution. That is, from the Cherokee Nation’s perspective, knowledge is created and shared so that those learning can then re-purpose it for their own ends. The CNO imagined high school teachers adapting this material in and for their curricula and therefore wanted its audience to be able to copy and paste the text. We agreed and so used a creative commons license on the work, a license that allows teachers to borrow what they need, asks them to attribute the work to us, and then permits them to reproduce it with non-commercial intentions. The creative commons copyright is closest to the Cherokee ethic of share, learn, share, but in the available designs students traditionally would work within, this was a fairly radical departure.

This class also revised the processes of design in ways that created another public space for collaboration. To do this, an infrastructure needed to be created that facilitated a third space where students, Cherokee nation representatives, and I could work on files together. In order to facilitate the sharing of these dozens of pages that the students created, the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State created a jointly shared server space for the Cherokee Nation and this class. Rarely are community members given access to university server space, but in such collaborations, the locus for design needs to include a revision of traditionally separate institutional spaces to make room for shared spaces. With thousands of files and dozens of nodes, this site demanded constant revision between Ben Phillips, the web media developer for the Cherokee Nation, and our class. Changes to the site’s navigation structure have taken quite a few hours of collaborative programming of memory-hog files, and these changes have been facilitated through the shared server space. Such a shared institutional space is no mean feat given the rigid and often unseen infrastructures that rest behind new media classrooms (DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill). Without institutional spaces supporting this collaborative, the work would have been discouraging and tedious at best.

Finally, students were asked to create a knowledge product different from those they typically produced in a class. This knowledge product, a new media educational site, was useful insofar as its form and content serves a community’s perceived need. While the Cherokee Nation surely has the capacity to do this kind of new media work and has been doing so for years in its award winning website (www.cherokee.org), labor and resources are stretched thin. Asking students to create these projects has augmented the Cherokee Nation’s robust site already in place, while it affords students the opportunity to develop their own writing and design skills. This site also contributed content to the Cherokee Nation’s site by helping the Nation present its version of the history of the formation of the state of Oklahoma without compromising their tribal knowledge. Our work helped the Cherokee Nation tell its history in ways that also brought attention to an important, though often overlooked, time. In both its form and content, then, the knowledge product of this class enacts a praxis of new media because it addresses the community collaborators’ rhetorical exigencies, purposes, and audiences. All stakeholders can potentially gain from their contributions during the praxis of new media, and importantly, these gains will be differentially distributed according to the needs of the stakeholders. Sustainability and Capacity Building: Institutional Resources Necessary for a Praxis of New Media

What does the Multimedia Writing class’s production of the website on the allotment era in Cherokee history reveal about the alignment of curricular, disciplinary, and institutional resources necessary to develop and sustain service-learning? Plenty.

(For Table 1 please see pdf file of document)

At MSU, the lab access and allocation were initially a problem. Because the problem with computing policy and hardware is described in detail elsewhere (DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill), I’ll summarize one aspect of the class that indicates types and kinds of support it would and would not receive. Multimedia Writing was initially offered to undergraduate English majors under a “special topics” listing. When I proposed that this course be made into its own freestanding curriculum with a designated course number, the proposal never made it past the undergraduate curriculum committee for disciplinary reasons alone; as I was told time and again in this English department: “We don’t do production.” That the course wasn’t developed in English was indeed fortunate.

As it turns out, faculty in the former department of American Thought and Language, charged with teaching the tier 1 classes at MSU, developed a vertical writing curriculum with a BA in Professional Writing and graduate degrees in the College of Arts and Letters. MSU allowed this department to change its mission to create a vertical curriculum based on the need to teach students production and interpretation together at once. In addition to the first year composition course required of all incoming freshman, our department now offers a BA in Professional Writing and a BA in American Studies. The Multimedia Writing course was proposed as part of the Professional Writing degree and now serves as an elective for three other degrees as well. It is now situated within the newly formed Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department where it has been supported in every way and at every level. As of last year, the English Education faculty have moved out of the English department and into the department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures, a move that represents the closer intellectual and pedagogical alignments between writing faculty and English Educators at Michigan State University.

Since it has found its institutional home in this department, the class has reached its fullest potential to enact a praxis of new media because the types and levels of institutional support have coalesced. In fact, as the undergraduate program in Professional Writing has developed, faculty in this program have worked hard to secure a computer lab for this curriculum that suits its. Professor Jeffrey Grabill developed proposals for the lab, coordinating among all faculty, and presented them to central computing. One lab was developed for this curriculum and a second is in the works for wireless computing for all the writing classes. Professor Danielle DeVoss, who sits on key university technology committees, continually secures our intellectual place among the computing services personal and other faculty. As associate chair of the department, DeVoss also has a handshake agreement and strong working relationship with central computing’s lab-scheduling office. As a result, DeVoss is able to schedule the lab a year in advance and insures that all the courses we teach have priority for the lab space.

Conclusion
A praxis of new media is an intellectual framework for scaffolding active work; rather than disappearing into the work once a project begins, the framework always allows one to see, critique, and adjust practice throughout the development and iterations of that work. A praxis of new media secures more potential for sustainability when types and levels of institutional resources are aligned; indeed, work at the intersections of community, critical and digital literacies is only possible when these alignments are achieved. Though the space of possibility that a praxis of new media occupies is difficult to obtain and sustain, it can result in transformed practices on many levels and is therefore worthy of our attention.

In large part, sustainability is driven by local need for the knowledge products our collaborations can produce. Needs change, of course, and when these needs no longer demand a contribution from various stakeholders, then the project can become a sleeping giant. Any collaboration can experienced a shift in needs, purposes, and capacities of stakeholders that can result in the work being placed on hold, even though the collaboration can be re-awakened when necessary. The sleeping giant metaphor suggests the resting potential of a praxis of new media rather than its lack of sustainability. Sustainability is not a zero-sum game, a collaboration that produces intense high rates of production or nothing at all. Rather, sustainability can be understood as maintenance of a collaborative potential at intensity levels that peak when needed but that can also rest when rhetorical purpose, resources, or alignments do not present themselves.

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