Week 6: Experimenting with Alternatives

I very much enjoyed the introduction to Jody Shipka's "Toward a Composition Made Whole."  She discusses her experience presenting a "Writing in Many Modes" workshop to a group "that catered to students who favored creative, hands-on approaches to instruction and were open to diverse kinds of learning experiences" (1).  I would place myself in a similar category in that I too favor "creative, hands-on approaches to instruction" and learning.  Shipka discusses the writing project she presented at the workshop that was completed by a student who wrote the words on a  pair of ballet shoes.  What she discusses following her presentation of this project seems to be a typical response to multimodal composing.  A man in the audience asked, "'I have a question.  So where did she put her footnotes?  On a shirt?'" (2).  Shipka goes on to comment, "Despite being phrased as a question, his tone, facial expression, and body language suggested this was not a genuine question or attempt at a clever pun so much as his way of signaling his discomfort with the kinds of texts I was proposing students might produce" (2, emphasis added).  I think the key here is discomfort.  

I admit that I too experience a bit of discomfort when I think of completing assignments with the use of some multimodal forms (mostly involving the use of some piece of technology that is foreign to me, like DreamWeaver).  However, I do have experience with other forms of multimodal composing and I have been able to create projects and assignments for classes as an undergraduate and graduate student utilizing multimodality that have communicated my goal better than any written assignment could have. 

As I stated before, my thesis project for graduate school was very nontraditional.  I wasn't in an MFA program; I was in an MA program where the focus was general English.  However, the program offered two tracks - creative writing and literature - and I chose to pursue the creative writing concentration (I had also minored in creative writing as an undergraduate).  The creative writing professors in the English department at my small school knew me and my interests well.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I was able to complete my graduate thesis as a creative writing project, but it wasn't poetry or fiction.  What resulted was a hybrid of poetry, prose, art, photography, and more - a project I refer to as a narrative collage, a story told through the use of text and image.

Dr. Kelcey Ervick, my thesis committee chair, taught a class on narrative collage that I took as an undergrad.  She understood the importance of multimodal composing like Shipka discusses in her article.  My project told the story of a young girl caring for her younger brother and I don't think the story could have been adequately told through text alone.  The anatomical images and diagrams, the drawings and paintings, and the original photographs I used contributed to a sense of pathos that I couldn't have accomplished otherwise.  I'm thankful for Dr. Ervick and her willingness to let me take on this project as an MA student; this experience has allowed me to see the true value in multimodal composing and the stories it can tell.

However, I think there was a sense of "discomfort" among the rest of my committee and the department as a whole since I was required to turn in a lengthy context essay with my project.  I think this is what Shipka is talking about when she discusses her workshop experience; while so many modes of composition exist, there is still a tendency to value the alphabetic text and forget that there are so many other approaches available to students.

This concept of acceptance applies not only to us as students, but as instructors of composition.  Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes discuss this in On Multimodality when they quote DeVoss and colleagues:  "English-composition teachers and programs must be willing to address an increasingly broad range of literacies - emerging, competing, and fading - if they want their instructions to remain relevant to students' changing communication needs and experiences within the contemporary cultural ecology" (35).  I would love to support a student's creative endeavors the way I was supported in graduate school. 

If a student has the "courage to experiment with alternatives," we as instructors should help to support and encourage them (Shipka 4).

A multimodal project I created as an undergraduate student titled Baby.  The assignment was intended to be multimodal and this project showcased the "heart" and personality of my younger brother.  

This multimodal collage project I created was published in the Spring 2015 edition of Harbinger Asylum (along with two pieces from my graduate thesis and another original collage).  This collage includes acrylic paint on canvas with Harter's images, paper, and quotations from a Stephen King short story called "Everything's Eventual."  I called it Maybe the Cleaners.

This multimodal collage is forthcoming from Plath Profiles:  An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies.  I created it after my favorite poet, Sylvia Plath, and it includes acrylic paint on multi-media paper, Harter's images, and quotes from Plath's collection of letters, Letter's Home.  I called this piece Relentless Cage.