Well, my comments on the Perusall article probably make me sound much more passionate and angry about this than I really am. My thoughts on the matter are pretty simple. I think multimodal assignments and rhetoric can be effective for teaching composition principles. I think multimodcal composition itself should not be confused as an appropriate end for a writing class. I think multimedia composing is both not relevant to teaching composition and, if the writers of that textbook introduction really believe it’s as important as they say, they’d naturally declare that multimodal composition should have its own dedicated academic department, intro courses, advanced courses, etc.

When I include a multimodal assignment it’s generally a requirement of the school I’m teaching at. I would not do it naturally, in the sense that I would not ask students to create videos, social media posts, websites, podcasts, unless it was part of the pedagogical approach of the department. I think we should be honest: the best thing from a teaching perspective about multimodal assignments is that they’re easy for us. Admit it. They’re easy to assign and describe because this isn’t our area of expertise, we aren’t beholden to (or usually even understand) the state of the art, and probably most important they’re easy to grade. They are much easier to engage with than an essay. Much easier to watch a video, scroll through a website, read some Tweets with images, than sift through an entire essay. Most departments I’ve worked at are explicit about this: you have the research paper and then “a bit of an easier time” at the end of the semester when you do the multimodal stuff. This isn’t even really my opinion, I’m just agreeing with what departments say about their own syllabi. I would reiterate something I brought up in my Perusall comments, that the ease of multimodal texts, both creating them and understanding them, is the exact reason they are so ubiquitous, and I think their ubiquity is the only reason they are imbued with all this meaning and importance by the kind of people who wrote that textbook intro. We should not confuse ubiquity with profundity. And, again, our students have so much more experience with these texts than we are going to give them by integrating it into our assignments. They intrinsically understand the conventions of websites, social media, YouTube, etc., from practice and experience. Having them create that stuff seems to me a lot like doing breathing instruction.

On the other hand, this does provide a good opportunity for teaching composition. For example, when we teach rhetoric, we are in search of texts that are alive to students and whose conventions they probably understand but cannot yet name. Multimodal texts are great for this. Movies, commercials, social media posts, etc., are the perfect object for composition exercises because they show that writing is the practice of exploring and expressing what you might know or feel on a gut level but have not yet verbalized. And contrary to an assignment like “create a website,” exploring how a commercial or movie works requires a lot more intellectual engagement and effort, and has good outcomes. So my view on multimodal pedagogy is that it’s good to use the texts students are familiar with and analyze them from a rhetorical perspective. But the end goal is writing a series of paragraphs that clearly expresses their insights, not to create examples of those texts themselves. If, once they’ve accopmplished that, we give them a chance to make a video about it, I don’t have a problem with it. Shrug emoji.