This WPA listserv post thread begins 22 April with a brief summary of Sonja Andrus’ CCCC presentation conveying the results of a survey distributed weeks earlier via the listserv requesting feedback re: the extent to which WPAs require multimodal projects in their writing programs, and it extends to 22 entries long.
Andrus describes her survey findings in “gist” form”:
- Those who feel they have authority and support and structure in place to require multimodal projects typically do, and they typically come from institutions that are less conservative and with what we might consider “better prepared” student populations.
- From the case studies: The faculty who are most supportive of programmatic changes in this direction see these changes as being very student-centered and focus on the ways that rhetoric and meaning-making have shifted over the years. They see this as an ethical move to help students read and write effectively in the world in which they live daily.
- The resistance appears to come from a center of fear among faculty who either don’t understand digital rhetoric or who don’t want to be seen as “less knowledgeable” than the students in some way in the classroom.
She notes that her findings “indicate a split between the leadership of the program and the workers in the program, who were fighting against the idea of requiring multimodal assignments.”
Some of the names entering the conversation include: Cheryl Brown, Fredrik DeBoer, John Peterson, Irene Clark, Duane Roen, Van Piercy, Claire Lauer, Marcy Bauman, Patricia Ericsson, Steve Krause, Diana Beltran, Kay Adkins, Jackie Cason, Edward White, David Schwalm, Pageen Powell, and Chanon Adsanatham.
One of the interesting features of this thread is the shift of focus apparent when comparing the last entries to the first. Pageen Powell’s contribution to the thread, one of the last at “Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 3:01 PM,” focuses solely on students. She writes that her program has been “wrestling with” the questions regarding multimodal assignments, but her post delves into approaches for teaching multimodal assignments (she offers classical rhetoric, particularly “ethos” and “kairos,” as a “solution”) as opposed to “leadership” and “workers” attitudes about teaching multimodal assignments.
There isn’t one “turn” towards a focus on teaching multimodal assignments rather than a focus on attitudes about them, but the final turn seems to be in the post before Powell’s. David Schwalm’s entry (Thu, 23 Apr 2015 23:34:54) offers a very detailed assignment description about Legos and instructions meant to illustrate the affordances and limitations of various modes (separating them). His entry entirely focuses on multimodal assignments and students’ interactions with them. But beneath the entry is the one he “responded” to, by Kaye Adkins, who voices a concern about teachers teaching multimodal assignments. She writes, “…my biggest concern is that bringing in multi-modal writing carries the same potential problems that bringing in social justice issues did. It makes it too easy for people who don’t really want to teach *writing* to avoid teaching writing. As long as multimodal projects foreground what I call the big three–structure, syntax, and semantics (and of course a host of other rhetorical and textual concerns)–I think they are great.”
One of the most interesting and pedagogically useful thread entries comes from Jackie Cason (Thu, 23 Apr 2015 12:46:55) who offers an assignment description stemming from the “open letter” genre. Her entry offers embedded links to examples of open letters, but the value of her contribution to the thread lies in her perception of what the students valued in the assignments she offered. Ultimately she illustrates that a contemporary, digital, “multi-modal” text appealed most to students; they recognized the contemporary value in constructing a digitally layered text—its affordances and constraints. Still…nothing in Cason’s post addressed the training of teachers.
Fredrik DeBoer’s initial response to the thread (Wed, 22 Apr 2015 12:41:09) can be interpreted as focusing on teaching multimodal texts (specifically digital, seem to me, though there is no indication in the initial post that the conflation of “multimodal” and “digital” is a necessary one, and certainly the later thread “Legos” activity doesn’t conflate the two concepts… Steve Krause explicitly asks the question in his brief contribution (Wed, 22 Apr 2015 21:27:02). But DeBoer’s post can also be seen as contributing to the conversation regarding how to train (or if to) instructors to teach multimodal assignments. He warns of some of the dangers of teaching digital assignments, such as coding or graphic design, as there are already departments specializing in the teaching of these skills; FYC must promote itself as contributing something unique and necessary to the intellectual capital of the institution is DeBoer’s point. The implication is that how we train people to teach multimodal/digital assignments must clarify the “unique and necessary” aspect of “teaching writing” through digital assignments; our goals must remain distinctly FYC.
Claire Lauer (Thu, 23 Apr 2015 07:38:49) references a study she coauthored and is in the process of “writing up” that finds “…compelling evidence to support teaching multimodal composition in writing programs. We have found that a wide range of jobs are now asking students to have facility with composing content that includes visuals, text, design elements, and/or video.” Though how this squares with DeBoer’s earlier warning against FYC making itself redundant at best isn’t clear.
Acting as a kind of nexus, Patricia Ericsson’s post (Thu, 23 Apr 2015 14:51:27) offers an abstract of and link to her article “The Crystal Ball Project: Predicting the Future of Composition and the Preparation of Composition Teachers” that both engages in a definition of “multimodal” and focuses conversation on teacher prep.
Ultimately, Sonja Andrus’ response (Thu, 23 Apr 2015 12:06:07) to the question as to how to define “multimodality” speaks a lot to the value of talking about teacher training in terms of digital and multimodal assignments. She writes: “ I think that our values about academic freedom are part of the conversation, as well as our values about what writing *is* and what it could/should be as we move forward.”
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