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This blog was originally posted on May 4th, 2015.
Today’s guest blogger is Jason Dockter, who teaches first-year composition at Lincoln Land Community
College. He recently completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University, with an emphasis on rhetoric/composition, with a specific interest in multimodal composition. His dissertation is entitled Multimodality, Migration, and Accessibility in Online Writing Instruction.
One of my initial goals within my first-year composition course is to expand students’ perception of writing. My students often enter FYC with rigid views of what it means to write, what writing looks like, and how writing composed within a school setting differs from writing they interact with and compose on their own outside of school. Multimodal composition projects provide an opportunity to push against these divisive perceptions of writing while increasing students’ rhetorical knowledge and their ability to transfer that knowledge to new contexts. Text design, especially, is a rhetorical element that is challenging to address in essay-based writing assignments. However, my multimodal interview project, outlined here, provides a prime opportunity to focus on text design by emphasizing the spatial mode, among others.
Objectives
Context
My FYC course is taught online at a community college, and my students range widely in terms of age, rhetorical knowledge, and even computer proficiency. The course is divided into learning modules, with each module focusing on a particular genre of writing, which we study collectively at first and individually later. Within each module, students become acquainted with a specific genre through an exploration into its conventions, by locating and analyzing examples of the genre, and later by developing their own text within the genre.
The Assignment
Students conduct an interview with a person (or people) associated with a topic they’ve chosen to research. Students use that interview as the content for the multimodal text they’ll design based on the interview genre.
Background Reading
Ask students to plan for the interview project by reading relevant content from your handbook or rhetoric:
Module Design
My approach for genre instruction begins with anexplicit genre pedagogy, then moves to an interactive genre pedagogy (see more discussion of this from Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, in chapter ten of Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Resear...).
Following these initial genre-familiarization assignments, students shift to brainstorming the development of their own interviews.
After students submit the Interview Project, I ask them to complete a reflective writing, intended to provide students with space to explain their vision for their interview. At this stage, I hope to learn how the composing of the interview went, along with how their rhetorical decisions impacted that text design. Specifically, this is where I get to hear from students about why their interview turned out as it did, their purposeful emphasis of specific modalities, and their media use within the text, helping me to better understand why these design decisions were made.
Student Projects
Here are a couple of my excellent student submissions (used with permission😞
Why This Assignment?
This project, as my students often interpret it, emphasizes the spatial mode, through the design of the interview on the page. Students become focused on design in ways that they are often unable to do when writing essays, where the format is often rigid. This is one of my favorite assignments within my FYC course because it shifts the emphasis from the content (writing) students will create for the text and emphasizes the design of the text, specifically considering how unique multimodal elements can be used to enhance the (often) alphanumeric text of the interview itself.
Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Mondays assignment? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post.
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