Making my case, and asking hard questions.

I’m going to do my blog-post early, and probably slightly off-topic this week. Our somewhat contentious end of discussion Thursday left me thinking about what I want to get done in a writing class (focusing for the sake of argument not on FYC but on say a 308J class that I want to address what I see as essential parts of alphabetic literacy that students need but have likely not mastered in or since their 151 course). That is fairly easy for me to imagine since I taught a 308J course last year and found that my students still had a great deal of stuff to learn about reading and writing. I had a fairly successful course that focused on having the students do ethnographic research on the places, genres, scholars, and discourse ecologies of their majors or expected professions. Since then, however, I’ve decided that the approach I took was probably a little to advanced for what is for many students only the second college course they’ve taken that has asked them to write extensively let alone tried to teach them anything about writing. My intention, should I teach a 308J next quarter is to take a Writing about Writing approach using Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Down’s (whom I had the pleasure of working with for a couple of years) new reader Writing About Writing along with some additional Rhet/Comp articles not included in that text, Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/ I Say, and Norton’s Little Seagull Hanbook . The proposed ten weeks would work as follows:

Week 1: Intro, syllabus, conversation about what makes writing “good”/successful, introduce the concept of writing as an emergent phenomena within complex ecological systems using articles by Porter and Cooper.

Week 2: Genre using articles by Bawarshi and Mauk and exercises in Genre analysis,

Week 3: Rhetorical Reading using articles by Haas and Flower, Kantz, Tierney and Pearson, and Penrose & Geisler

Week 4: Class workshop, small group and/or individual peer reviews of Paper 1

Week 5: From reading to writing articles by Swales, Greene, Kleine, and Casanave, They Say/I Say chapters.

Week 6: Workshop/peer review activities paper 2

Week 7: Students in the conversation/ rhetoric: Articles by Wardle, McCarthy, Harris, and Grant-Davie, They Say/I Say Chapters

Week 8: The rest of the process, articles by Nelson, Perl, Tomlinson, Lamott

Week 9: Individual Consultations with students

Week 10: Workshop etc. Paper 4, conclusions and reflections.

Final Portfolios due by scheduled final.

This is, of course, very rough and lists more, really, than I’ll actually be able to do. I will have to make choices about what articles will be most beneficial and which I can do without. I’ll have to balance discussion of articles with exercises and activities that help students practice skills related to the knowledge about writing we’re discussing. So reality will not be this optimistic. However, this isn’t as optimistic as I could be. I’d really like to take some time to discuss Grammar, style, proofreading, and editing. I’d like to take a day to go over print design (ha, there’s some multimodal stuff I’ve taught before but ended up cutting because other things seem more important), I’d like to meet individually with students more often ( I probably will force them to come in after the second paper, but I’ll have to do that outside of class time). I’ll also require responses to readings that students will post to the course blog to which I’ll require them to respond in comments. Paper 3 will be an annotated bibliography of their research for paper 4, which I want to try building via wiki with separate pages for the various aspects of writing the students choose to write on. The final paper will be a researched academic argument. The first two papers will be selected from a list of genres I find useful:

Rhetorical Analysis

Critical Analysis

Genre Analysis

Literacy Narrative

Discourse Ecology Ethnography

Autoethnography of their writing process

Etc.

So, where in this schedule is there room to teach students the affordances of other modes, the knowledge needed to make effective rhetorical choices using them, and the skills (especially technologis/software) to make one of these assignments a required multimodal project? I have in the past allowed students to make certain projects multimodal if they wanted and could. I always encourage students to make their papers look good as best they can to encourage thinking about design, but I don’t have room to teach principles of design, or software programs, or the terminology and affordances of video, audio, etc.

Except for workshop, peer review, peer response, and individual consultations, most of my students’ work on projects happens outside of class. With alphabetic genres, I don’t worry about students knowing how to type or use the basic functions of word processing software.

I do use technologies in my class (blogs, wikis, blackboard). I don’t have students turn in hard copies anymore. I comment on papers using track-changes/mark-up, but these technologies are so simple and ubiquitous that it doesn’t take much if anything to get students to where they can use these technologies. I don’t require them to put visuals in their blogs, and I wouldn’t require visuals on wikis just like I don’t require visual design of type or visual images in their research projects. I encourage all these things, but I leave it up to students to decide if that is something they are comfortable doing since they are on their own to figure out how if they don’t already know.

Now, I view 308J as a writing class not a writing intensive course. I know that others teach it as a writing intensive course where writing is secondary to other knowledge. I’m not comfortable with that since the 308J is listed as “Writing and Rhetoric II” and because it is only the second writing course students here take unless they are in a writing related program. If I were teaching a writing intensive course where I felt like learning writing itself was a secondary rather than a primary goal for the course I might feel comfortable including a multimodal project and taking a class or two to instruct students in the affordances of video/audio as well as some principles of design. I would be most comfortable doing that if it was part of the content of the course, but I could see doing it even when it wasn’t. In fact, as I’ve mentioned, my 284 students this quarter will be doing a collaborative multimodal composition as their third short project. The way I conceived it probably isn’t as rigorous as the authors of Multimodal Composition would like. I originally planned to give students the option of what multimodal technology they want to use (to allow for the fact that some students may not be comfortable designing a web-site, video, etc.), and I conceived collaboration as a way of pairing up those who are already comfortable composing in other modes with those who aren’t. I wasn’t planning on teaching much about technologies because that isn’t really one of my purposes. I wanted to do a multimodal project in order to let students experiment with multimodal composition within their comfort zones not to push them out of their comfort zones and teach them how to compose in multiple modes. Pardon my ignorance. If I do it again, I will probably plan a day to teach some basic competency with wikis and require the students to construct multimodal wiki sites for their projects. I still, however, don’t know how much time I would spend teaching visual rhetoric etc. when the course content is writing about culture, which I view as a course meant to focus less on the general affordances of writing and more on the discourse features specific to the ecology of cultural studies.

All this is why I feel that the only proper place to teach all the things Multimodal Composition is telling us we need to teach is in the context of a class specifically on multimodal composing, which I would be very interested in teaching. I just don’t think it is realistically feasible to teach these things to an extent that makes the effort worthwhile within the context of a writing course especially, but even in a writing intensive course. Yes I can see giving multimodal assignments that require only some basic instruction in certain applications, but that is not the same as taking the time to teach the affordances of video, still image, audio, how image and text interact, etc., etc. There is quite a difference between teaching students how to put together a video and teaching them all about how video communicates, its affordances, and the rhetorical choices involved. We can always remind them to think about audience purpose and genre, but that isn’t the same as teaching them how those rhetorical principles function differently in different modes.

So, do I think I can or should incorporate multimodal composition into my planned 308J course? No. Do I think I can design pedagogically better multimodal assignments for courses like 284? Sure, but I don’t think I can take enough time to teach multimodal composing itself beyond what the experience of doing the project will teach. If multimodal composing is or ever will be an urgently needed essential skill for students to have as so many texts have argued, I think the only way to teach it is to teach it in a class designed for that purpose.

On the other hand, I think that everything I teach in my planned 308J will help students compose better multimodal texts. Everything I teach about discourse ecologies, writing in conversation, using sources, rhetoric, and process applies to multimodal composition just as much as it does to alphabetic composition. Is the reverse true? Can everything we would take the time and effort to teach in a class on multimodal composition be equally applicable to alphabetic composition? I don’t think so. I could be wrong?

Is it okay to assign multimodal assignments without taking the time to teach the affordances of video etc.?

Is Multimodal Composition making the inclusion of other modes out to be more of a thorough time-consuming effort than it needs to be?

Are we incorporating other modes into our work or taking on the responsibility to make students literate in those modes? What is the difference?

Is it enough to include discussion on reading other modes when we teach reading rhetorically/critically?

In Chapter 9 of Multimodal Composition Alexander repeats previously stated ideas about multimodal not necessarily involving digital texts with video/audio, but would those urging us to teach new media literacy really think asking students to drop some visuals into their word documents with an effective tag line and some reference to the image in the text was good enough?