Recently, I’ve been leading a month-long discussion on Stanford’s Book Salon, an online group started by the late great Diane Middlebrook. Diane was the noted biographer of Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes as well as of Billy Tipton (The Double Life of Billy Tipton chronicles the life of the jazz pianist who, for over 50 years, “passed” as a man—check it out!).   Diane was also a brilliant and supportive colleague and teacher; students literally lined up to get into her seminars. And she was a big fan of memoir. I’ve now hosted two of these salons, and each one has given me a chance to remember Diane and also to engage participants in reading and exploring graphic memoirs. The one we are currently working on is Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?   That’s Chast on the right, facing her parents, George and Elizabeth, to whom the book is dedicated, as they insist that they will talk only about “pleasant” things, among which are not death and plans for their very late years.   I find that graphic narratives work extremely well for memoir: the combination of words and images allow Chast to speak in her own voice and, through speech bubbles, allow her parents to speak for themselves; her drawings of them etch them firmly in readers’ minds. Especially haunting is the series of sketches of her mother that Chast drew during the last day of her mother’s life. No words needed there.   What has struck a chord with the people participating in the book salon is Chast’s unblinking honesty in describing her parents’ long decline and the part she played in their lives. An only child, Chast got more support/empathy from her father than her mother, who was the one IN CHARGE of the family in just about every way. Chast seems a lonely child, one left alone every day after school and often ignored, especially by her mother. When she married and moved away, Chast didn’t visit her “deep” Brooklyn home much, but that changed when her parents reached their late 80s and 90s and obviously needed help – though they would never admit it. As Chast describes it, they were “a unit,” timeless and everlasting, without a need for any other person at all.   Chast perseveres, however, though she hates doing it and hates not doing it: and that is the dilemma readers react very powerfully to. Many have found themselves in similar situations with aging parents: it’s not easy and it’s not pretty, yet children want and need to do what they can, while loathing many aspects of the work. Chast brilliantly captures the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences in her own encounter with her parents’ last years.   She also manages to capture the absurdness of aging often in hilarious ways. Her father, moving slowly into dementia, moves in with Chast while his wife is in the hospital—and he becomes obsessed with a bunch of bankbooks back in his apartment (most of them acquired on a special “deal” that, for depositing $100, gets George and Elizabeth a “prize” of some kind—a toaster, blender, etc.). Convinced that evildoers are trying to break in and steal the bankbooks, he talks endlessly of them as if they are themselves survivors of some dreadful ordeal.   I have taught graphic memoirs since shortly after Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and I realized that I should be paying a lot more attention to comix, as he termed it. I’ve never had a student who was not moved by Maus: in the early days, when they had never heard of the book, some were dismayed that the Holocaust was the subject of a comic book. As soon as they entered the world of the narrative, however, they were captivated: over the years, a number of students told me they had disliked history until they read that book. I also loved teaching Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, a coming of age memoir, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? And of course there are so many others: Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese; Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow; GB Tran’s Vietnamerica—I could truly go on and on.   But I do not teach these works in literature classes—but in writing classes. I have found that college-age students are drawn to memoir and that the image/word combination resonates especially strongly with them. So we analyze the panels and gutters, studying how they carry the story forward silently, and we look at the structure of the entire work and imagine “translating” it into a research-based essay or another genre, looking at the rhetorical strategies at work in each version. Inevitably, we do some drawing too (I am the worst in the room at this!), and several students have gone on to create graphic memoirs of their own and to publish them online.   What I absolutely love about all the possibilities open to writers today is the freedom it offers students as they literally write/draw themselves into being. College is a time of self-representation, of identity-creation, of learning about who you are. To me, graphic narratives in general and graphic memoirs in particular make a perfect vehicle for exploring these questions. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio).   With all of my multimodal teaching, I do admit that I still hold on to the idea of paper assessment for multimodal projects.  Part of this is due to the fear that when it comes time for grading I will not be able to access students’ work on their blogs. The other is the affirming experience (for students and teachers) of collecting tangible evidence that they have completed their work.  I have come to feel comfort in the ritual of collecting student folders at the end of the term and looking them in the eye and asking, “Is everything here... to the best of your knowledge?  They answer with an accomplished, “yes.” I even ritualistically break out my rolling suitcase for the occasion to drag them all home.   In one of my earlier blog posts I discussed the use of academic blogs, and I have come to use them in almost all of my classes.  Students’ shape multimodal compositions for multiple audiences and purposes and include deep links, detailed context and connections that don’t often come across on the printed page.  In the past I had students print out screen captures of their home page and media content and make document copies of their blog posts.   Lately students vocally resist printing (many of them don’t even own printers anymore).   I have plenty of theories regarding their resistance to printing but I realized that in their world, as digital natives, this is the norm and that they were perfectly comfortable with electronic submission and online evaluation.   I am listening . . . and examined my own resistance to this shift (as a digital immigrant) and decided to try to restructure my evaluation models to be more multimodal.     I still believe that it is important for students to be held accountable in a physical world for some things.  This also keeps the agency where it belongs – with the students—to check, articulate and organize their work over a semester.  I use a couple of tools and assignments that help me maintain this agency and provide structure and overview when reviewing multimodal student work.    1. Revising the blogs Near the end of the semester, I ask students to return to the work they have completed over the term.  This assignment asks students to move from a series of isolated blog posts to a larger collection with patterns and connections.  It helps them understand the blurred line between classroom and public spaces for writing and teaches them deep revising practices beyond textual editing.  I ask them to return their posts and revise them for engaging writing, audience awareness embedded links, proper citation and a rhetorical awareness of their digital identity go back and examine and craft the online identity for their blog and incorporate ideas and images from their work in the class revise their About page they created in the beginning of the term and re-see their purposes and authorial personae through the eyes of their purposes and journey through the course.  When students composed their original posts, their classmates were their primary audience.  This revision should take into account the shift towards a more public audience in which the blog stands on its own in a digital space.  This includes reshaping titles, adding captions to images, embedding links, and perhaps defining terms that are specific to the classroom discourse community.  See my assignment,  Revising Your Blog Guidelines (Kim Haimes-Korn) for guidelines and criteria.   2. Reflective Narrative I modified a reflective narrative assignment to act as both a final reflection on their work for the class and as a final post in their course blogs. Students read back through their posts from the semester and create a closure (or continuation) piece for their blogs for a public audience. I ask them to closely examine the subject matter and the connections they made in the class and explore how they are reading across the texts in their blog and connecting the concepts of the class in their writing and thinking.    I instruct them to draw upon and quote from their own writings and ideas and write a detailed account of the ways they have explored their ideas in the class through textual referencing. In this post, they must intentionally cross link to their earlier blog posts.   They can think of this reflection as an overview of what is included in their blogand write it as an extended introduction to the entries that follow or as a closure post in which they look back on what they have done.    3. Annotated Bibliography and Abstract This part of the assignment is very helpful when evaluating student work on their blogs.  Since I encourage students to give their blog posts engaging titles, this list identifies the assignment number, title and give a short abstract/summary of the work.  Not only does it help me in grading but it teaches them the form of the Annotated Bibliography and online citation practices and prepares them to create short abstracts of their work for metadata and other academic purposes.   4. Statement of Self-Evaluation This statement should NOT appear on students’ blogs. I am the only audience – teacher as evaluator – for this writing.  Students write an evaluation of their work and performance and in the class. They create a detailed portrait of themselves as  working writers and evaluate their progress with justification from their writings (by citing particular movements in their texts, style, etc.).   Students also need to complete the student evaluation (SE) portions of the rubric for a "Portfolio Evaluation" Sheet by returning to the criteria introduced in the class.. These holistic marks should be reflected in this Statement of Self Evaluation.   5. Rubric of Blog Contents and Description When students complete the course, they must go through the checksheet on Rubric for Multimodal Assessment (Kim Haimes-Korn) and confirm submission on all of their blog posts and assignments. I also include evaluation criteria to help them define what constitutes strong work in this digital environment.     Reflections on the Activities: Although I don’t collect all of their work, I ask students to complete the rubric checksheet, print the reflective narrative, Annotated Bibliography and Abstracts, and their Statement of Self-Evaluation.  I refer to their online documents and respond, in writing (either on the text or through electronic commentary for online submission) to the documents and fill out the teacher evaluation portion of the rubric while holistically marking it for assignment criteria to justify the grade. This gives students a way to remain accountable for their work and  teachers  a space to interact with their multimodal projects.   We are still in the process of understanding what it means to teach in multimodal classrooms.  As teachers, we need to consider the ways this changes our pedagogical approaches and student-teacher relationships.  It is important that we consider new approaches to assessment and evaluation that honor this shift and allow us to expand our definitions and practices. . . and to leave the rolling suitcases at home.   Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things.  She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity.  You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Compositio ... View more

As I grade multimodal projects, I’m always frustrated when I find errors that demonstrate that a concept didn’t stick with students. I ultimately spend about half my grading time wondering if the errors I find are my fault. Even though everything is explained repeatedly in assignments, course blog posts, and in the classroom, I fail to communicate some ideas to every student.   As an example, consider the multimodal course that I teach, Writing and Digital Media. Most of the students in course are English majors or minors. They enjoy writing and are usually fairly good at it, as the screenshot on the right from one student's final project shows. When I begin talking about multimodal composing however, they can struggle to follow the concepts, even though they are well explained in the textbook that we use, Writer/Designer, and we go over them repeatedly in class.   As I am planning the course for the fall term, I am thinking of directly addressing these ten issues that I hear students ask questions about most often:   Multimodal does not mean digital technology. Multimodal texts engage multiple modes of communication. You don’t need digital technology to do that. An illuminated medieval manuscript is just as much a multimodal text as a YouTube video is. It doesn’t mean multimedia either. A multimodal text may use multimedia (multiple media, like photos, animation, words, sounds), but it doesn’t have to. Everything in the composition classroom is multimodal composing. It’s impossible to write a text that engages only one mode. Take a traditional essay, printed out and stapled in the upper left corner. That text includes the linguistic, spatial, and visual modes of communication at a minimum. People have been learning about multimodal composition for centuries. Since everything in the writing classroom is multimodal composing, it’s not surprising that teachers have always taught about more than one mode of communication. When you learn how to use layout and design to make the words stand out on a page, for example, you’re learning multimodal composing techniques. What’s important isn’t how, but when and why. How to use multiple modes of communication when you compose is the easy part. What’s important is learning when to engage the different modes of communication and why they bring meaning to the text. Using every mode doesn’t necessarily make a text better. Use all five modes if they help you communicate your message, but don’t add modes just because you can. Make sure that they add to the meaning of the text. Communicating with the visual mode isn’t limited to using photos. Sure photos can be part of it, but you’re also using the visual mode when you add bold text or change the size and color of a font. The gestural mode includes both body language and movement. The word gestural does make you think of gesture, but gestural mode isn’t limited to things that people can do, like smile or wave their arms about. Any kind of movement that communicates with a reader uses the gestural mode. It’s easy to compose a multimodal text. It’s actually impossible not to create a multimodal text. When we add words to a word processing document, for example, we may not think about the multimodal communication we are using. We add visual elements when we choose specific fonts, when we add emphasis by changing a font to bold or increasing its size, and when we indent the words to signal the start of a paragraph or a blocked quotation. It can be challenging, however, to compose a rhetorically effective multimodal text. It is easy to compose a text that uses multiple modes of communication, but it takes work to make sure that the different modes contribute the intended meaning to the text. As you compose multimodal texts, think constantly about your intentions and make sure that the different elements that you add to the text help you say what you intend to.   I am thinking of sharing the list itself, creating an accompanying infographic, or maybe making some memes and posters. If I can convince students of those ten concepts during the first weeks of class, I think they will have an easier time as they work on their projects. I hope so anyway.   What are the ten things that you most wish students knew about the topics you teach? How do you communicate those issues to the class? Share a strategy with me by commenting below or connect with me on Facebook and share your experience. ... View more