Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. 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 Composition
I just returned from the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication), our discipline’s premier national conference in Baltimore. It was a great opportunity to interact with other engaged composition teachers and to explore new ideas. I was encouraged to see the number of presentations focusing on and featuring multimodal projects and pedagogy. Multimodal composition is firmly planted within our field.
This trip was particularly special because I had the pleasure of presenting and mentoring three of my graduate students on a panel at the conference. I met these students through my work in my Composition Theory and Pedagogy class in 2024, where I teach about the impact, processes, and practices of multimodal composition. These students, who are now Teachers of Record in their own FYC classes, have incorporated these approaches into their curriculum. I dedicate this post to our experience at the conference and share materials from our presentation.
Some Context:
In his essay “Writing Is Not Natural,” composition professor Dylan B. Dryer calls to our attention to the fact that writing is, and always has been, an expression of technologies. The feather quill, the ballpoint pen, and yes, the very laptops our students use are all technologies in their own right. Writing has always been a way to embrace technology. As a cohort, we have bonded over the possibilities of this communication. We remix the ideas surrounding multimodality and sample this idea across different formats, believing that the best way to honor composition’s past is by embracing its future. Our students, as it turns out, often agree. We share a series of low-stakes assignments that celebrate multimodal technologies and practices.
Writing itself is a remix as we cross disciplines and genres. Digital and multimodal composition brings together visual, audio, and kinesthetic modes along with the written text. We now consider design and audience experience as part of our rhetorical situation and train students to move around and explore options that lead to critical and creative thinking. Our classrooms themselves are intricate symphonies that harmonize through collaboration, composition, cadence, pitch, and rhythm. Music is a natural metaphor for what we do as composition teachers. The A-side of composition is reading and writing, but the B-side is the low-stakes multimodal assignments where the students experience learning through invention without a heavily weighted penalty, developing a soundtrack for their writing. Remixing the first-year composition course requires innovative scaffolding.
We share multimodal, low-stakes assignments that draw upon music, both literally and metaphorically. Through using music as a lens, students come to understand connections to events, emotions, ideas, and cultural influences. What follows are our individual ideas and the ways we use technology tools to promote critical and creative thinking. For the full details for each assignment, see the attached presentation slides and handout.
Kim Haimes Korn - Curating Creative Playlists
Curation is an important skill for students to understand the processes of collecting, selecting, interpreting, creating, and sharing in the FYC classroom and across the curriculum. Students curate research articles, images, and a variety of shared content. We tend to think about playlists existing outside of the classroom, but they can engage students in a range of important rhetorical and interpretive skills that promote research and critical thinking. Playlists can inform, tell stories, express themes, and communicate ideas. Kim shares some low-stakes assignments that engage students in curation and interpretation through playlists, such as the soundtrack of your life, cultural critiques, thematic threads, and place-based and generational research. See my full post, Curating Creative Playlists (2023) as part of the Multimodal Mondays blog.
Emily Crocker - Jamming With Canva and Mood Boards
The power of visuals cannot be overstated, especially in an attention-based environment such as the FYC classroom. Much like how an album cover is vital to the promotion of a record, Canva serves as a design platform that allows students to deliver professional content such as videos, presentations, Instagram reels, wallpaper, and much more. Emily shares her Canva Mood Board assignment that remixes student research through collage. Students learn the benefits of visual design and data visualization through extending their research ideas in new ways.
Heather Voraphongphibul - Composition Karaoke
Students can delight in the aural qualities of traditional rhetoric as they aid in understanding audience awareness and rhetorical appeals. Modern recording technologies provide instructors with mediums that enhance the repetition, alliteration, and poetic waxings of rhetors that impact audience awareness and the skills of growing writers. Heather shares a Composition Karaoke lesson, using Voice Thread, that further pushes these remixing practices by allowing students to incorporate songs, sound effects, and other sonorous approaches to convey meaningful messages. She has students research, rewrite, and record movie monologues through the lenses of genre, audience, and tone.
Emily Chick - ReVision and Remix
Remixing is revising through changing, blending, or altering to create something new. In this project, students remix the narrative essay through three modes: text, visual, and audio. Each part of this project extends students' creative and critical thinking skills. Students write a narrative, create a vision board, and generate a song using the Gen AI program Suno Music creator. This program offers features like personalized lyrics, discovering new artists, and curating playlists, making it a versatile tool for creative projects. Emily discusses the ways instructors can incorporate multimodal, low-stakes assignments through reVision and remix.
******************************************************************
As academic professionals, we often present at conferences to share our ideas and teaching practices, but this post gives us a chance to expand our reach and share with our readers here. As a long-time teacher of teachers, I appreciate the mentorship opportunities that these platforms provide. bell hooks reminds us in Teaching to Transgress, that teaching is about experimentation and engagement in the classroom. Multimodal pedagogies offer many possibilities for learning and expression. We are reminded that integrated, low-stakes, multimodal assignments provide incremental scaffolding that helps students think critically and creatively on their way to their larger, major assignments.
References:
Dryer, Dylan B. “Writing Is Not Natural.” Naming What We Know, Linda Adler-Kassner, University Press of Colorado, 2015.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 1994.
