Auralitaly and Web 2.0

While reading Selfe's article on aurality and multimedia composing, I was surprised to learn that it is not a common practice, in English composition classes, to use oral modalities of assessment. I started wondering if it is the same for any junior or high school class: in general, is students' work in the USA assessed mostly through written forms? Are oral forms only limited to class discussions and presentations?

As a kid, I remember reading Shultz's comics, "The Peanuts," where the characters would often participate to elementary schools presentations called "show and tell." In Italy we didn't use to do the same thing; rather, we were assessed on our knowledges both through oral and written tests whose grades would equally bear on the student's final notes. This system worked (and still does) from elementary to high school, and it is largely used in the university as well, both for the humanities and for scientific subjects.

Differently from the States, anyhow, in Italy we are rarely required to interpret on what we study. Of course, the success of an oral test is strictly linked to the degree of naturalness with which a student exposes the chapters or the books s/he has studied: the mastery of the topic is telling of the degree of understanding of the topic itself. Nonetheless, a personal contribution to the study material is not the focus of a form of instruction which is mostly interested in providing the students with a set of notions and concepts. This is true not only at an elementary and high school level, where indeed it can make sense; it is an approach that continues also at the university, at least during the first three years of undergraduate studies.

Still, I admit that I have been largely helped in my writings by the necessity of being persuasive during my oral tests. Preparing an oral test engages the student in the development of a series of strategies which go from the control of anxiety to the understanding of the professor's personality to the exercise of memory and expository skills: it is, by and large, a true rhetorical exercise. What I used to enjoy the most of it, was calibrating the amount of notions that I managed to remember, and my ability to "sell" them in a way that was persuasive enough in respect to my degree of knowledge of the subject. Of course, this trick was easier with Italian or Latin literature, more difficult with history or philosophy, almost impossible with math, biology, or physics. For sure, I as a student was given the possibility of mastering the power attached to what Selfe defines the "enactment of authority, power, and status" (634); yet, this possibility given to students varied greatly according to their character or interest in the subject itself, and not always it was self-empowering.

In the diverse cultural population of American schools and universities, the Web 2.0 seems to be a good means to allow an extensive use of oral and aural tools through processes which empower students by making them used to bring their own voices in a "hierachized" environment. Differently from the Italian high school of the 1990s and 2000s, American high schools have different kinds of hierarchies with which students have to relate: not only are those hierarchies generational, they also are cultural and ethnic. Besides, as Selfe writes, American education is heavily based on writing practices, and on a dissociation of writing from speaking; the Web 2.0 therefore seems to provide an interesting space where to develop and preserve students' power strategies, which range from orality to musicality to use of images and so on. Besides, it allows a kind of engagement that is different and maybe more appealing that the simple working on texts - in this respect, anyway, I do think that it is necessary to include in a Web 2.0 literacy the critical awareness on the contents of a multimodal learning process, in order for the Web 2.0 to be used as a freeing tool, and not as a dumbing big brother.