Bridging the Multimodal Gap: From Theory to Practice - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607327961 ISBN 13: 9781607327967

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Bridging the Multimodal Gap addresses multimodality scholarship and its use in the composition classroom. Despite scholars' interest in their students' multiple literacies, multimodal composition is far from the norm in most writing classes. Essays explore how multimodality can be implemented in courses and narrow the gap between those who regularly engage in this instruction and those who are still considering its scholarly and pedagogical value.
 
After an introductory section reviewing the theory literature, chapters present research on implementing multimodal composition in diverse contexts. Contributors address starter subjects like using comics, blogs, or multimodal journals; more ambitious topics such as multimodal assignments in online instruction or digital story telling; and complex issues like assessment, transfer, and rhetorical awareness.
 
Bridging the Multimodal Gap translates theory into practice and will encourage teachers, including WPAs, TAs, and contingent faculty, to experiment with multiple modes of communication in their projects.
 
 
Contributors: Sara P. Alvarez, Steven Alvarez, Michael Baumann, Joel Bloch, Aaron Block, Jessie C. Borgman, Andrew Bourelle, Tiffany Bourelle, Kara Mae Brown, Jennifer J. Buckner, Angela Clark-Oates, Michelle Day, Susan DeRosa, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Stephen Ferruci, Layne M. P. Gordon, Bruce Horner, Matthew Irwin, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Ashanka Kumari, Laura Sceniak Matravers, Jessica S. B. Newman, Mark Pedretti, Adam Perzynski, Breanne Potter, Caitlin E. Ray, Areti Sakellaris, Khirsten L. Scott, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Jon Udelson, Shane A. Wood, Rick Wysocki, Kathleen Blake Yancey

About this title

About the Author

Santosh Khadka is assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge.
J. C. Lee is assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bridging the Multimodal Gap

From Theory to Practice

By Santosh Khadka, J. C. Lee

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-796-7

Contents

Introduction: Extending the Conversation: Theories, Pedagogies, and Practices of Multimodality Santosh Khadka and J. C. Lee, 
Section I, 
1. On Multimodality: A Manifesto Rick Wyosocki, Jon Udelson, Caitlin E. Ray, Jessica S. B. Newman, Laura Sceniak Matravers, Ashanka Kumari, Layne M. P. Gordon, Khirsten L. Scott, Michelle Day, Michael Baumann, Sara P. Alvarez, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, 
2. Reimagining Multimodality through UDL: Inclusivity and Accessibility Elizabeth Kleinfeld, 
3. Dissipating Hesitation: Why Online Instructors Fear Multimodal Assignments and How to Overcome the Fear Jessie C. Borgman, 
Section II, 
4. Reversing the Process: Video Composition and the Ends of Writing Mark Pedretti and Adam Perzynski, 
5. Thinking beyond Multimodal Projects: Incorporating Multimodal Literacy into Composing and Reflection Processes Tiffany Bourelle, Angela Clark-Oates, Andrew Bourelle, Matthew Irwin, and Breanne Potter, 
6. Archiving Digital Journaling in First-Year Writing Steven Alvarez, 
Section III, 
7. Blogging Multimodally: A Multiyear Study of Graduate-Student Composing Practices Kathleen Blake Yancey, 
8. When Multimodality Gets Messy: Perception, Materiality, and Learning in Written-Aural Remediation Jennifer J. Buckner, 
9. Entering the Multiverse: Using Comics to Experiment with Multimodality, Multigenres, and Multiliteracies Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Aaron Block, and Kara Mae Brown, 
10. Digital Storytelling in the L2 Graduate Writing Classroom: Expanding the Possibilities of Personal Expression and Textual Borrowing Joel Bloch, 
11. Multimodality, Transfer, and Rhetorical Awareness: Analyzing the Choices of Undergraduate Writers Stephen Ferruci and Susan DeRosa, 
Section IV, 
12. Distributed Assessment from the Runway to the Classroom: A Model for Multimodal Writing Assessment Areti Sakellaris, 
13. Multimodal Pedagogy and Multimodal Assessment: Toward a Reconceptualization of Traditional Frameworks Shane A. Wood, 
(In Lieu of an) Afterword: Rewriting the Difference of Multimodality: Composing Modality and Language as Practice Bruce Horner, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

On Multimodality

A Manifesto

Rick Wysocki, Jon Udelson, Caitlin E. Ray, Jessica S. B. Newman, Laura Sceniak Matravers, Ashanka Kumari, Layne M. P. Gordon, Khirsten L. Scott, Michelle Day, Michael Baumann, Sara P. Alvarez, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

Introduction

We offer this chapter as a manifesto; specifically, it acts as a set of tenets about multimodality and its place in our pedagogy and research. Additionally, this manifesto articulates and frames activities of thinking, being, and making from our perspectives as rhetoric and composition scholar–teachers occupying a particular cultural, historical, and technological moment. We draw our manifesto approach from design studies and employ the genre in a way that ties it to scholarship in and histories of design thinking, but our work is anchored in writing studies.

The First Things First Manifesto was originally published in 1964 and primarily drafted in England; it responded to a particular cultural moment of advertising, capitalism, and speed––that is, to the Modern values dominant in the culture at the time (e.g., the individual Self, Science, Technology, Progress, and other capital-letter values that trumped notions of complex subjectivity; more cautious, critical engagement, and multivocality; truths rather than Truth). In it, the twenty-one authors called for a more humanistic approach to design — a reversal of priorities away from gimmickry and slick sales and toward the importance of street signs, books, catalogues, and other design objects that influence our everyday lives.

In 1999, "First Things First Revisited" was published by Rick Poynor in Emigre Magazine. In this text, Poynor offers a rich historical and cultural discussion of the importance of context to the original 1964 piece. Poynor argues further that although historically anchored, the claims of the original piece are as meaningful in 1999 as they were in the 1960s, and that, indeed, "we live and breathe design. ... Designers are engaged in nothing less than the manufacture of contemporary reality." That same year, a "First Things First Manifesto 2000," authored and signed by thirty-three designers, was published simultaneously in Emigre, AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Eye Magazine, and Blueprint. In it, the authors point back to the 1964 document and toward the future of design, arguing that design has a significant role to play in public discourse.

In 2014, the website firstthingsfirst2014 was launched, and it attracted more than one thousand six hundred signatures and continued the distribution of the 1964 tenets along with new tenets. By drawing attention back to the effects of design on the lived experiences of human beings, "First Things First" marked a particularly significant moment for design studies that has rippled throughout these later texts. While we are not necessarily claiming writing studies is in a historical, institutional, or cultural position similar to the one design studies was in the 1960s (indeed, we argue we are not), we do want to leverage the rhetorical velocity (Ridolfo and DeVoss 2009) of the manifesto genre in similar ways and for similar purposes to those of "First Things First."

Our manifesto is multivocal. It emerges from the combination and pluralism of our voices and positionalities as we articulate our shared — and, at times, conflicting — perspectives on multimodal composing. We also draw in voices from scholars in our field to situate and amplify our claims. We lean on stories and experiences. As Malea Powell (2012) has importantly reminded us, "Stories take place. Stories practice place into space. Stories produce habitable spaces" (391). Although the bullet points below in some ways obscure the rich tapestry of stories underneath them, this piece is informed by story — by the research shared by scholars, by our experiences in classrooms and discussions in our hallways, and by the narratives we weave as we present our work at conferences. In this piece, then, we combine our voices with others in order to further situate rhetoric and composition as a habitable space for multimodality.

Manifestos, moreover, can live and breathe. They can circulate. Their tenets are organic, flexible, and malleable. Ideally, they have rhetorical velocity and are repurposed, taken up, adopted, altered, and live beyond their original contexts and places of publication. Taking up these affordances, what we hope to offer in the chapter is a replicable stance — a series of processes, approaches, and practices readers can adapt and put to use in their scholarship, at their institutions, and in their classrooms.

The Tenets

On Thinking Rhetorically

Rhetorically informed scholarship shapes our thinking on multimodality and technology. Stuart Selber (2004), for instance, calls attention to the ways functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies must be balanced in fostering digital literacy, and we extend that perspective to multimodality writ large. Such a perspective, specifically, can help composers employ appropriate modalities and technologies, and approaching composing processes rhetorically can also emphasize an orientation toward social efficacy and action. We also agree with Cynthia L. Selfe (2009) and Bump Halbritter (2013) that an attention to less-privileged semiotic modes can reveal alternative forms of rhetorical activity: "With the yoke of language ... lifted, writing may not only be and do new work, it may live and breathe in scenes of symbolic action that we may not have been recognizing as scenes of writing" (Selfe 2009, 8).

Here we offer tenets for thinking about multimodality and composing generally as markedly rhetorical activities:

Technology is not an end but rather a pedagogical means; we should never teach technology for technology's sake, nor multimodal composing for multimodality's sake, but rather as a way of supporting particular individuals and groups trying to achieve defined aims within socially contextualized spheres of action, for whom multimodality may be an effective method of rhetorical communication (Adsanatham 2012; Borton and Huot 2007).

Writing and technology are not monolithic, determined, or static entities but exist at a nexus of complex and nonlinear historical developments, social and economic situation(s), and political and institutional apparatuses. They are dynamic and multilocal, and thus we must resist totalizing narratives that position technology as necessarily tied to Western development and instead interrogate the heterogeneity of technologies through and with which humans act to make meaning in the world (Fraiberg 2010; Haas 2007; Zielinski 2006).

Students need to engage in not only the technical (how-to) aspects of work with digital communication and composition media and technologies but also in critical analysis of that media. At the same time, scholars, teachers, and students alike should recognize that distinctions between theory and practice are not necessarily tenable, and we should keep in mind the recursive, co-constitutive, and to some degree inseparable natures of thinking, acting, making, and doing.

Students––along with their teachers––should explore different computer and communication technologies so they may choose the best medium to facilitate their writing and respond to the rhetorical situation. We cannot split practices of making from those of critiquing and making knowledge. Practices of multimodality, like digital literacy, are best comprised by a balance among functional, critical, and rhetorical orientations (Selber 2004).

On Making

Practices of designing and making have become increasingly important to our field and to pedagogy-driven initiatives in general (see, for instance, EDUCAUSE posts and initiatives: Labb and Neely 2014; Pirani 2014). One strand of designing-as/and-composing has been with us since the New London Group, who argued in 1996 for a pedagogy of multiliteracies that "focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone" and that attends to the resources of meaning as "constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes" (64). While the NLG highlighted the semiotics of composing, more recent scholarship has attended to making as a material practice of composing, and Richard Marback (2009) articulates design thinking as a paradigm for composition, arguing that design "is the making of a meaningful thing, an artifact that means in the world independently of the meaning created for it by the designer" (402). Jim Purdy (2014) also explores a design thinking approach for composition, arguing that design thinking produces composition processes that are generative and focused on creating rather than analysis. Angela Haas (2007) has called us to think about how making-as-semiosis is not as a novel practice but one that has been culturally and rhetorically employed in American Indian communities for some time.

In the larger world of education, we are currently witnessing a developing interest in sites of making. The New Media Consortium Horizon Report (Johnson et al. 2016), for example, has given makerspaces an estimated time to adoption of two to three years within university structures (42). Given that both practices and spaces of making tend to be unevenly associated with STEM fields, scholars of rhetoric and composition must contend with and respect new forms of composing that integrate and hybridize computational, digital, and material processes. We offer the following tenets of how making can and should inflect our work:

To truly address multimodal meaning making, we must work across a bandwidth of critical analysis and constructive production: making. Material artifacts are not only objects to be analyzed, as has generally been the tendency in our field, but products and containers of the semiotic activities invested in them. They are, in this respect, compositions.

Furthermore, practices of making and critical activity must be rendered mutually supportive. Such a perspective does not privilege one or another paradigm but sees them as two sides of the same coin: analysis informs production; production informs analysis (Halbritter 2013; Murray 2010; Shipka 2011).

Similarly, we must negotiate and continuously reorient ourselves across a spectrum of theoretical framing and practical doing. Multimodal composing requires that we interrogate and negotiate different tools, technologies, languages, and interfaces and that we also use them, experiment with them, make with them, and reimagine them. Making meaning requires taking chances, and taking chances requires the risk of failure. Failure itself can be generative and productive and is often a necessary iterative component to making. We see all of these, perhaps most especially failure, as necessary to developing robust, multimodal pedagogies that integrate practices of making.

Just as we ask students to integrate maker identities into their composing ethos and activity, we must also demand the same of ourselves. If we ask students to ideate, compose, and produce in particular genres and/or with particular modes, we ourselves should create with them so we too experience the challenges and pleasures of "composition in a new key" (Yancey 2004).

On Teaching and Curriculum Building

Multimodal composing cannot exist outside a larger ecology of teaching and curriculum building. Scholars ask us to consider ourselves as students (always learning) in our process of building multimodal pedagogies, as well as to include students in our curriculum development (Ball 2004; Sealy-Ruiz 2016; Selfe 2004; 2009; Shipka 2011; Yancey 2004). As Selfe (2004) persuasively asserts, "If our profession continues to focus solely on teaching alphabetic composition — either online or in print — we run the risk of making composition studies increasingly irrelevant to students engaging in contemporary practices of communicating" (72). Teaching and curriculum building are fundamentally important to the undergraduate students we teach, to ourselves as graduate students and emerging scholars, to the pedagogical practices we take up, and to the ways in which we develop practices that span both classrooms and programs. Thus:

Teaching multimodally and teaching multimodality are not the same as simply adding a "digital assignment." A multimodal pedagogy is not just additive; rather, it is a stance, an orientation, and a privileging of the many ways of making and receiving meaning. This work challenges the perceived primacy of "traditional" modes of meaning making, as well as the outcomes of "traditional" composition practices.

We must remember we continue to learn and grow with our students. We should develop low-stakes assignments for our students to engage with first as they encounter new technologies (Sheridan and Rowsell 2010). Allowing students to explore before delving into more complex applications of a tool helps build both our students' and our own comfort level with the possible applications of technology.

We must include student voices and, when possible, the ideas of other stakeholders in our curriculum-building processes. Our pedagogy should attend to student needs. Asking students what benefits they seek in our multimodal pedagogies allows us to attend to the knowledge they bring to the classroom so we can help them move beyond the classroom. By asking alumni and community partners what they look for from multimodal composers, we attend to the professional practices, processes, and places beyond our classrooms.

We must work to create, foster, and sustain cultures of multimodal composing in our departments and the institutions in which they are situated. This project demands conscientious attention to theories of multimodal composing, as well as to its practices, processes, and products as manifested across all the stakeholders in our professional worlds: undergraduate and graduate students, staff, faculty, administrators, advisors, and others.

The multimodal work we do will not always be understood, supported, or valued by institutions or our students. We must anticipate this resistance and be prepared to articulate clearly why multimodality matters in the context of our classrooms, our curricula, and our programs.

We must be attentive to the larger curricular, departmental, institutional, and professional contexts in which we work. Our courses do not exist in a vacuum, nor does multimodal composing. We should look toward committees, caucuses, community organizations, corporations, and others to help inform the ways in which we understand multimodal composing and how, where, when, and so on it enters the world.

On Approaching Evaluation and Assessment

As our field has said of print texts for some time, evaluation and assessment should be directly informed by and clearly linked to the rhetorical purposes of any activity or assignment. This context is, arguably, even more true of multimodal composing. We must always attend to the rhetorical dimensions of such composition, asking questions like: What modes and media are engaged by a piece? How do these choices fit audience needs and expectations? How does the composer's engagement with the modes and media speak to or work against the exigency being responded to? These questions draw us to a rhetorical understanding of multimodal evaluation and assessment, a perspective described by Sonya Borton and Brian Huot (2007) and by Heidi McKee and DeVoss (2013), among others.

We assert, then, the following:

We should evaluate multimodal compositions with a frame and lens of remediation; composers do not necessarily abandon "old" literacies or "traditional" practices when composing multimodally. Rather, we are working across a span of meaning-making practices that include these processes and others, and our assessment practices should account for this fact. More specifically, we must create evaluation structures that do not ask students to abandon our best rhetorical processes and practices in the face of new tools, spaces and places for composing, or "different" types of compositions.

When possible, we should build rubrics for multimodal assignments with students and use evaluation approaches as a heuristic for thinking about composing multimodal products. We should seek out examples with students and approach these examples to cultivate an understanding of best practices that influence composing and evaluating (Adsanatham 2012; Stedman 2012).

Practices and processes of multimodal composing are best supported by approaches both formative and summative, with each type of response anchored to the particular composing moment. They are also best supported by assessment practices that encourage play and exploration (Sheridan and Rowsell 2010) and design thinking (Purdy 2014).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Bridging the Multimodal Gap by Santosh Khadka, J. C. Lee. Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607327961
• ISBN 13: 9781607327967
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302
• Editor: Khadka Santosh, Lee J. C.