This quote seems to sum up many of the conversations that have been taking place in my coursework thus far in the Rhetoric & Writing program - technology is constantly growing and expanding and changing the way we complete tasks, but academic work doesn't seem to reflect the changes taking place. This question keeps popping up in every one of my courses: Why does alphabetic text continue to be the preferred modality when so many more composing modalities exist? Why do schools/teachers avoid multimodal composing in favor of the written text? Where is the disconnect?
This is where I found the Kristine L. Blair chapter, "Teaching Multimodal Assignments in OWI Contexts," to be particularly interesting. The challenges to multimodal composing that she presents are very real in the university setting. Some barriers she mentions include "the presumption that writing remains a 'text-based' process," "limited/inconsistent access to digital composing tools," and "the lack of faculty training" (474). I've seen these challenges and more step in and keep instructors from encouraging multimodal composing in the classroom and I've experienced some of them myself.
Recently, our ENG 6020 Comp Instructor's Workshop course required us to create a "lighting talk" (a quick presentation on a specific writing convention) PowerPoint or Prezi complete with a script and sound recordings. When this assignment was announced in our class, chaos ensued. In Blair's excerpt, she mentions that the General Studies Writing director stated that her graduate student instructors were more likely to incorporate multimodal composing into their curriculum than their faculty counterparts, probably due to graduate students' "recent training and often generational status as millennials" (472). However, this wasn't the trend I saw in my ENG 6020 class that day. My classmates (and me, to an extent) were terrified about this assignment because we had little experience with multimodal composing as students in the classroom setting. If we had such little experience with multimodal composing, how were we expected to teach it and use it in our classroom?
Another challenge I've experienced is the access to certain apps and programs that can be necessary for multimodal composing. I've been wanting to work on my webtext review assignment for ENG 7280 outside of class, but without the Adobe Dreamweaver software on my home computer, this is an impossible task. I was able to recently download a free trial of the software on my computer and work on the project that way, which is helpful for students who may commute to campus or who have work/family responsibilities outside of school. This challenge and those previously discussed are barriers that consistently get in the way of truly incorporating multimodality into the writing classroom, and are challenges I've experienced firsthand as a student and as an instructor.
The other readings for this week point to digital composing as a way for students to learn more effectively (as with using blogs for peer review with EFL students), complete assignments more efficiently (and creatively), and "reduce costs, allow students to self pace through courses, and even improve retention" as evident through the discussion of hybrid courses (Warnock 13).
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| Despite everyone in my ENG 6020 class being graduate students, I think we all struggled a bit to create the multimodal lesson plan. Here's a bit of the alphabetic lesson plan that I posted alongside the multimodal presentation on Canvas. |
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| We were required to include a script of the audio so the presentation would be ADA compliant. |
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| The background images were a bit basic in my presentation, was I was proud of how my first multimodal lesson plan turned out! |
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