In an earlier project on the possibilities of multimodality in the classroom, co-author Kristen Macias and I proposed expanding the New London Group’s multiliteracies framework to move beyond the idea of “situated practice”—a “pedagogy that is constituted by immersion in meaningful practices within a community of learners who are capable of playing multiple and different roles based on their backgrounds and experiences”—to consider the role of audience engagement (85). We advocate consideration of a “situated audience” to enhance students’ focus on the affordances and constraints of particular modalities:
if a professor tasks her students with transmediating their existing research papers into digital audio podcasts, a student may interpret the assignment by producing an audio track of himself reading his paper aloud with no other substantial changes. In one way, he has fulfilled the assignment: he has produced an audio-based text that serves to re-focus the text for a hearing audience. However, the student has obviously not taken into consideration the particular affordances and constraints of the audio medium, and he has not considered the user experience of his new audience. To consider audience in a meaningful way, the student must imagine how the listener will engage with his new text; he must consider the situated audience. (Lafond & Macias, in press)
Rather than focusing on developing knowledge of specific composing tools (e.g. audio editing platforms, video recorders, graphic arts platforms, etc.), paying attention to the “situated audience” asks students to build on their experiences as readers in order to compose new texts at the level of experience. Building on adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon’s modes of engagement—showing, telling, and interacting—students enhance their focus on user experience, thus developing texts that are more attuned to the affordances and constraints of communicative modalities.
Why do students need this perspective? While most rhetoric courses emphasize the importance of audience awareness, coupling the New London Group’s functional grammars with Hutcheon’s modes of engagement creates a practical heuristic for students to attend to audience awareness. Considering how a multimodal text is crafted from both the composer’s perspective and the audience’s perspective allows a more complete consideration of rhetorical effectiveness. Moreover, by taking into account both modes of meaning making and modes of engagement, additional functional grammars not initially articulated in the New London Group’s multiliteracies framework are revealed. For example, the functional grammars do not include the notion of tactile design—considering how users’ sense of touch is engaged in a given composition. Taking into account audience interactivity suggests that tactile engagement is a necessary consideration: How will the feel of a given text affect audience interpretation? If a text is produced as a physical object, how will audience reception differ from the same piece in a digital format?
With this background in mind, I set out with this current project to connect students at UIUC to the social justice history of the campus they inhabit every day. Initially I had considered developing an interactive website-based map that would allow users to click on various locations around campus and read about significant moments in the social justice history of the space. However, after generative discussions in class, particularly with Sebastian, I decided to pursue something even more interactive with a geocache-based project. By incorporating geocache into the project, I am painting my social justice history project with a much more complex experiential brush. Rather than having the user interact with my text by pointing and clicking with a mouse, “readers” will now have to go out onto the campus proper, find the planted geocache, and experience the text in a more complex fashion.
What is a geocache? Geocaches are small containers that people plant in various locations, posting the coordinates online for others to hunt for and find using a compass and/or GPS coordinates. Geocache containers “at minimum… contain a logbook for finders to sign,” but they can also contain small items such as keychains or “trackables” which “have a unique tracking number engraved on them and move from geocache to geocache towards a goal” (“Geocaching Newsroom”). Websites such as Geocaching.com host forums for users to post their geocache coordinates and collect points for finding geocaches.
Why geocache? Geocache is a fairly accessible way for students to engage with ideas of augmented reality that combines physical elements (the geocache container, the contents of the container, the geocache location) with minimal digital prowess (GPS, Internet browsing, QR codes). Part of my goal with this project is to marry the physical and digital realms, having students consider the ways in which digital spaces are not disembodied realms but instead are developed by real people with real bodies and—whether we like it or not—real prejudices. The social justice-oriented geocache offers the opportunity to reveal ideologies undergirding the institutions that surround us, re-framing space by offering a lens into another reality.
Some have begun to consider the pedagogical implications for geocaches, particularly in the realm of public health and physical education. In a study at Texas A&M University titled “Geocaching for Exercise and Activity Research (GEAR),” researchers found that “the average GEAR participant walked 10 miles per month while geocaching alone, walking approximately 1-½ miles on each geocaching trip and averaging 72 geocaching trips a year” (Mitchell). One of the principal investigators in the study, Whitney Garney, M.P.H., asserted that “geocaching is one option for people to have fun and be physically active at the same time without going to the gym and may be just what America needs to get moving” (Mitchell). Garney and her team see geocache activities as potential for intervention in public health.
Indeed, physical education instructors have begun incorporating geocache into their lesson plans in order to make required physical activity more engaging for students. In an article for Physedagogy—a site devoted to innovative physical education pedagogy—high school PE teacher Naomi Hartl describes a QR Code Geocaching activity she uses with her students to achieve “an alternative environment outcome where we want students to enhance their learning by becoming confident and competent in multiple movement activities within different environmental settings” (Hartl). Students are divided into groups and each given an initial set of coordinates to locate a geocache container with a QR code. Using a QR code scanner on their phones, students scan the container and are taken to a Google form where they can sign in and receive the next set of coordinates. Moving from cache to cache, students engage in physical activity and learn to navigate terrain using a GPS and compass. I ended up implementing Hartl’s QR code idea into my own geocache.
Beyond public health and physical education, teachers have also implemented geocache into social and historical curriculum. For example, as part of the Civic Media Project, Antero Garcia and Ellen Middaugh detail a geocache-based student project created in 2012 called “Race to the White House” in which students “placed items in geocaches around the city of New York that led players to student-created sites about various political issues.” The authors suggest that the project “saw the convergence of mobile technology, geospatial learning, and civic engagement” (Garcia & Middaugh). My own social justice-oriented geocache would bring together these elements, and future students will continue to actively engage with these ideas as they craft the next generation of geocaches associated with this project.
While research into geocacheing’s role in education has largely been localized to the fields of geography, history, and physical education, but I wanted to know how this digital tool could be implemented within a composition curriculum, specifically within the larger framework of social justice-oriented critical pedagogy. Seeking to marry the digital and embodied realms, this essay will discuss a proposed social justice-focused series of geocache locations on and around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s main campus. While I have only piloted the first geocache location for the purposes of this project, I suggest that future students can engage collaboratively in expanding this project by researching the history of their campus, composing websites that present their research findings, and planting physical caches for future students to find.
While I’ve always been engaged with issues of social justice and equity, I’ve found myself particularly consumed with these issues in my move from southern California to the Midwest. My previous learning and teaching contexts have been in incredibly diverse settings; before coming to UIUC, I had only ever taught at historically Hispanic-serving institutions with majority Latin@ student populations. In choosing to pursue my PhD at UIUC, I knew I would experience some form of culture shock, and I’d say the single biggest “shock” has been the ongoing debate over the Chief Illiniwek character.
I was only mildly aware of the Chief Illiniwek character before moving to Urbana-Champaign. My dad graduated from UIUC in 1980 in electrical engineering, so I occasionally heard about “the fighting Illini” growing up, but as I don’t follow sports, I didn’t come across the Chief until much later. Even after choosing to attend UIUC, I didn’t really think about the school’s mascot (or lack thereof) as my concern was on academics. It wasn’t until people started asking me if I’d participate in what they saw as “the typical Midwestern pastime” of attending a football game that the Chief even came onto my radar.
During my first month here at UIUC, I attended a screening of the documentary In Whose Honor? (1997) hosted by the Native American House. This film details the debate surrounding Chief Illiniwek, focusing on the involvement of Spokane graduate student Charlene Teters in organizing protests against the Chief in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After the screening, representatives from the Native American House and the documentary’s director, Jay Rosenstein, hosted a talk about the film, further filling in details about the controversy within the local context. Assistant Director of NAH, Beverly Smith, spoke about reporting any instances of the Chief she saw on campus as acts of intolerance to the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations.
I came away from that session much more aware of the Chief’s persistence on campus. I started noticing the Chief on hats that my students wore and on stickers that adorned their laptops. While I didn’t feel comfortable following Smith’s example of reporting these instances as “acts of intolerance,” I also wanted to do more to increase student awareness of the issues surrounding Native American representation on campus and the troubling legacy of Chief Illiniwek. As I considered how to approach the topic with my students, an incident occurred on campus that pressed the exigence of the issue.
As part of the 2017 Homecoming festivities, the Honor the Chief Society were granted a position in the Homecoming parade on Friday, October 27th, 2017. In the lead up to the parade, the Illinois Student Government issued a statement condemning the Honor the Chief Society’s inclusion in the parade. University of Illinois Student Body President Raneem Shamseldin wrote in her statement:
The University of Illinois has made great recent shifts to make “Inclusive Illinois” a true statement. From getting rid of the war chant to funding a new African American Cultural House, your commitment to inclusivity is noticed and appreciated. I was surprised to hear that the Chief would be making an appearance at our homecoming parade. I understand that this is being portrayed by the Honor the Chief Society and not the University, but it is still happening at a University event, on University grounds, on University watch. (“Statement”)
Shamseldin took specific umbrage with the fact that the parade would pass by the campus’ cultural houses, particularly the Native American House. According to a report in The Daily Illini, the Illinois Student Government decided to take direct action a few days before the scheduled parade: “following a meeting with alumni, students with indigenous backgrounds and Native American House staff, Illinois Student Government sent out information that it would be boycotting the parade” (“Protesters”).
The boycott manifested itself in a protest march that initially walked alongside the parade and ultimately, as the parade route turned from Wright onto Green street, led to a group of protesters blocking the Chancellor’s car and the Honor the Chief Society from continuing. Footage of the protest was posted widely on social media from various participants, and interpretations of both that footage and first-person accounts of what happened that evening conflict. Some claim that the protesters aggressively pushed back against the car carrying the Chancellor and law enforcement officers; others claim that the driver of the car carrying the Chancellor attempted to drive into the protesters
The Illinois Student Government maintained that they had no part in the protesters deciding to block the parade route. In an official statement available on their site, they asserted the following:
Over the course of the event, some protesters spontaneously engaged in a blockade of the Chancellor’s car and the Honor the Chief Society. This was outside the scope of what ISG had planned for. Below are a few clarifications we would like to address:
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The Illinois Student Government does not condone violence. Period.
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The Chancellor made it abundantly clear to a number of student leaders that neither he nor his wife, felt unsafe by the actions of the protesters who spontaneously blockaded the car.
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It has been confirmed by numerous administrators that protesters did not need a permit to protest and therefore did not violate Illinois State law as has been erroneously claimed.
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There was absolutely no intention to follow or protest the Marching Illini. The timing was completely coincidental and we apologize for the disruption this led to.
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There was an incident where a protester and a police officer had physical contact. The officer used contact first, and the UIPD decided not to press charges against the protester.
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The Illinois Student Government did not violate anyone’s freedom of expression, as there were individuals who counter-protested. Furthermore, we welcomed everyone’s feedback during public comment last Wednesday night. Members of the public have always been invited to share their opinions during all ISG events, which was even seen at the Illini Democrats and Illini Republicans Debate, where the role of ISG in organizing protests was discussed.
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An unauthorized user had access to our social media and unilaterally posted a live stream of the event without permission. Since then, their access has been revoked.
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Not one member of the Illinois Student Government committed an act of violence.
In contrast to this version of events, conservative news outlet Campus Reform led with the headline “Parade halted, officer assaulted during protest” (Minik). Taking a more middleground perspective, GEO spokesman Gus Wood—participant in the protest—was quoted as follows by The News-Gazette:
the car didn't move very much, but a couple of protesters received bruises. "At a certain point, you keep your foot on the brake. You don't take your foot off the brake," he said. "We're lucky that nobody was injured," he said, recalling the incident in Charlottesville, Va., where a protester was killed at a white supremacist rally. (“No charges”)
No matter the interpretation of what occurred that night, it was clear to me that the issue of the Chief on campus was still very much an active one.
In trying to decide how to approach this issue, I found myself conflicted: I initially envisioned a series of geocache locations around campus with links to specific archival footage that would highlight particular events of protest in UIUC’s history, but the more I thought about that approach, the more I began to consider audience and what I really wanted the function of this project to be. A series of protest footage would ultimately alienate a large portion of my intended audience as people don’t particularly want to be confronted with images of conflict. My next inclination—to provide an overview of the Chief issue including the history of the iconography and the how it came to represent the school—was also problematic: in covering the history of the Chief, I would be reifying the image, potentially enacting further violence against indigenous people. It seemed that any way I might approach the subject could be either problematic or toothless by turns.
In composing the website for the geocache location, I ultimately decided to focus less on the Chief controversy and more on the indigenous population of the area and on Native American presence on campus. In this way, I would be offering an alternative narrative to the Chief-dominating conversation which might lead to greater insight as to why indigenous people might not want the Chief to continue.
To this counter-narrative end, I put together a series of links under a few umbrella categories: the Indigenous People of Illinois, famous Native American alum Wassaja (also known as Carlos Montezuma), and Current Indigenous Presence on Campus. I had toyed with the idea of writing an essay that would bring these various pieces together, but, in the end, I decided to go with a more Wunderkammer-style site that collected sources that are already available into one place. In this way, I’m following the tradition of Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box Logic” in which he discusses composition as curation in the work of Joseph Cornell. By placing items in juxtaposition to one another—in this case, the indigenous context of the campus as opposed to the Chief—readers/experiencers take away their own meaning from the installation. This move requires surrendering a degree of authorial control, but in thinking about the spatial rhetoric of placing the geocache near the campus Native American House, I felt comfortable being less directive in the geocache’s landing page site.
At the geocache location, people will find a small plastic waterproof box that contains the following: a QR code that takes them to the geocache landing page which contains the sources I’ve gathered on the local indigenous population of Illinois and contemporary Native American resources; a small notebook to sign and date; and business card-sized fliers to take with the QR code and general information about the project printed on them. In the future, I’d like to add to the cache some additional items—most specifically, a zine I have planned on addressing the Chief controversy tentatively titled The Team Warrior Squirrel Manifesto—but for the time being, I’m fairly satisfied with what I have put together.
While I’m relatively happy with the inaugural geocache, I definitely see further implications for this project. Though I was able to enhance my experiential text by planting it in situ, my own technical limitations did not allow me to create the most effective project. For example, while the geocache takes readers to a specific location, the experience of that location is disrupted by the use of the QR code and subsequent website. Ideally, I could see this same kind of content integrated into an augmented reality-based app—akin to Pokemon Go—that projects images and video onto real settings.
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Want to see what a geocache-integrated curriculum might look like in the classroom?
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