I had the good fortune in grad school to take a couple of courses with Cliff Siskin, whose project at the time involved repositioning literary studies around the concept of “mediation.” His contention was that we ought to pay more attention to the forms in which literary expression occurs (genre, in other words; Ralph Cohen’s influence was notable here), the ways in which those forms are always changing, and the relations among media (the “remediation,” for instance, of “pages” and “sites” as “websites”) as technological shifts unfold. To oversimplify, it was essentially a marriage of communications theory (McLuhan, Walter Ong, et al.) and literary studies: interdisciplinarity in its best sense. This strikes me as essentially what today’s article is after, with its talk of information channels and compositional modalities, except that it misses the fundamental lesson that *medium* makes all the difference. There’s a qualitative cognitive distinction, at the very least, between reading and writing, on the one hand, and composing in other media. That doesn’t mean that those media aren’t worthy of study, nor that helpful comparisons can’t be injected into a writing class, but it does mean that our focus should be on texts. Perhaps we should revive the old disciplinary designation “letters” (as in the study of, or professors of) to encompass this somewhat expanded–but still, I think, properly bounded–sense of responsibility.

I agree with all of Andrew’s wonderfully acerbic annotations. Without rejecting its potential upside, I do think that there are two very simple (negative) reasons for the appeal of multimodal (which, it turns out, is just multimedia?) approaches in composition courses. Firstly, we’re accustomed to being on the defensive about our discipline, so it’s tempting to make literary instruction sexy by showing how it can incorporate new technological toys. Forgetting, of course, that paper and ink are already technologies perfectly suited to certain kinds of expressive practices and even certain states of being. Tools aren’t neutral; they push back against users. We have more tools every year, but worsening outcomes. This isn’t a coincidence. Secondly, it’s just *easier*, rather than accepting the foregoing, to let students operate in other media and pretend that we’re teaching some sort of enhanced “literacy.” Being a good English professor is very, very difficult: it means encouraging students to embrace discomfort and to resist all the other media influences that conspire to keep them weak, shallow-minded, unfocused, and easily distracted. It’s like trying to teach gym class. They’ll hate you while they’re jogging around the track, and they may not realize the benefits for a long time (or, if you give them the option of sitting on the bleachers and checking their phones instead, not at all). It’s far more appealing (and probably better for our careers, in the short term) to be the cool English professor and invite students to make YouTube videos or to tweet.

I think it can be far more effective, when we invoke other media at all, to keep the focus on *text*. Writing the script for a YouTube video, or thinking about tweets in the tradition of the aphorism–*without sinking too much valuable time into actually producing those things*–might be helpful ways we can incorporate teachable new media “moments” into a class that’s still primarily devoted to those skills we all know are imperiled and which students (when they’re being honest with themselves) rightly look to us to teach. I see that I’ve blown my time on negativity, which wasn’t intentional, so I’ll close by promising to say more during our meeting about how I’ve used translation and adaptation exercises (essentially a kind of ekphrasis) to put texts into new lights.

When I teach research I tend to approach it both conceptually and practically, thinking through the latter as a way to anchor the former (since, as we’ve seen, students typically haven’t been introduced to the reasoning–the *philosophy*, if that isn’t too grandiose–behind research as a human endeavor, and instead treat it as yet another series of academic box-ticking exercises). I find that analogies with basic but universally meaningful activities work well. I’ll invoke, for example, conversation: “Imagine that you’ve just arrived at a party. The room is crowded, and you can’t say for sure how long people have been there, or whom you’re likely to meet. Everyone’s already formed their little conversational groups, with their drinks held in front of them and their elbows out, attention directed away from you. Your job is to find a conversation that interests you, gracefully enter it, and make a contribution that will somehow, however slightly, change its direction. When you leave later that evening, the party will continue indefinitely, but that single conversation will have been forever altered–just a bit–by your unique contribution.”

I find that this works well even at the outset of a course in explaining low-stakes assignments such as discussion posts, and that it then lends itself to reuse as we build toward longer, research-paper-style projects. Students all naturally understand what makes for a good conversation. They know that someone who simply parroted what another speaker had said or who expressed blanket disagreement without offering justification wouldn’t be considered a “good” conversational partner; they know that nuance and originality (not to mention some attention to rhetoric) are expected. When we move from concepts to specific assignments I like to break capital-R Research into at least four subsidiary “moments,” or cognitive moves. The first involves identifying a gap (we talk in 1101 about “curiosity” in this respect): where are the holes in our existing knowledge? Where’s the edge of the map? This is where intuition and even a sense of play can be important: I ask students to think about what they’re noticing, and why; to be sensitive to wrinkles and points of friction; to attend to hunches. The second step involves framing a specific, neatly bounded research question, to which I always attach at least three qualifications. A good question must be precise, practicable, and provocative. Our third step is the “methodology” discussion: where are you going next, what are you going to do, and how are you going to do it? Lastly, and once a nice big messy pile of information has been gathered, we ask ourselves about the best form (genre) in which to present our “new” knowledge. I explain that the classic undergraduate research paper is a very good genre (a very good form for its purposes), that its popularity is justified, but that it isn’t by any stretch the *only* way to present new knowledge.

At its best, this addresses the two principal shortcomings I’ve spotted in research-oriented courses: 1) students aren’t conceptualizing research in productive ways (or at all; this is the “why are we doing this and what’s the point” question); and, 2) students are hobbled by passivity (it’s been trained into them) and need to be prodded to take small, concrete steps consistently until they discover their own motivations.