Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe’s article on approaches multimodal student essays is interesting reading. I have definitely heard these arguments before, and with a lot of the same reasoning behind them. One thing we hear a lot is that communication technologies and styles are moving forward, and we in the English Department need to get with the times. We also hear the student engagement argument – that multimodal assignments are more fun for students, and we can see this in the way they respond. I’m just going to take on these two points and leave the rest for a later discussion.

First, I have been concerned for a while about a kind of vagueness behind the urgency to overhaul our syllabus to replace long, (read: traditional, boring) academic essays with student-produced websites, animated sequences, videos, recordings and the like. Much of it seems to be a reaction to our multimedia environment changing and wanting to be “where the kids are at.” In other words, it’s a kind of fear of our field becoming irrelevant. This fear is evident in the first few sentences of Takayoshi and Selfe’s essay. I found myself asking, what, actually, is the problem with “words on a page, arranged into paragraphs?” Isn’t this exactly the format of the paper Takayoshi and Selfe composed?  If writing is not “words on a page, arranged into paragraphs,” what should it be? Or is that kind of (traditional, boring) writing okay for people like Takayoshi and Selfe to master, but not for students at the undergraduate level? If this is true, it leads us to a place where I don’t think we want to be – a two-tiered understanding of who REALLY needs to know how to read and write, and who will be fine if they can just be reasonably fluent in the written discourses accessible to anyone with a social media account.

Speaking for my own teaching, it takes my students more than a semester to learn how to organize their writing into paragraphs. The paragraph is hardly a minor, boring detail, but the organizing principle of long-form text. Of course, if we are arguing that long-form text itself is something we no longer need concern ourselves with teaching, then we can certainly throw the whole idea of “words on a page, organized into paragraphs” to the winds. I have a hard time imagining that math departments debate and struggle so passionately over whether it’s time to rethink “numbers on a page organized into equations,” and whether or not it’s time to move on from it all. This is something that we in the humanities torture ourselves over.

In terms of student engagement, as I put in my text notation on the article, I have had great success with using video and audiovisual content in my composition classes, but I use it as content for students to respond to in their writing. I use it as a way of getting students to think about writing as a form of cultural expression capable of bridging communicative genres, and to empower them to be more articulate critical thinkers: to be able to comment on a wide variety of forms of expression. The result is that they do become engaged in new ways. That, I think is the value of multimedia content in first-year composition. I do not see my approach as offering a diminished place for such content. In fact, it represents a significant shift from what you’d find in the first-year composition classroom even fifteen years ago.

We need not be so thirsty for fun and excitement in our writing classes. Like learning any other skill, sometimes writing isn’t much fun, but we still need to learn how to do it. Finally, student engagement with writing is a difficult thing to see sometimes, because writing is essentially a private activity. We often only find out at the end of the semester how much they’ve really learned, and what it all meant to them – and often it takes them that long, too.

Reading Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe’s article about multimodality and composition felt a bit challenging but resonated with me about my deeper feelings on teaching writing snd writing in general. First and foremost and I might catch some shade for saying this but the writing process isn’t fun. I could go log into my twitter right this moment and see prolific writers posting about their pain and suffering with getting anything written on the page. For writing instructors and other writers, this is less sad but mostly hilarious. I think to a degree, it takes a little bit of lying to ourselves to say that the process is enjoyable. I often spend time at some point during the semester having the discussion with my students that the writing process can feel difficult and even dull at times. If you regularly experience anxiety, I even think that an appropriate metaphor for writing is the feeling of having a cage match with yourself. To get it done, you just need to sit down, grab your writing tool, and push through all the ways your brain is just telling you to sit still and remain safe, not to think. At least this is something I like to share with my students because they get some commisserable joy out of this discussion.

Why do I bring this up though? I feel the goal post for the writing discipline is always on the move. We constantly have to defend our place in academia and frankly it is tiring but this can also be an opportunity for growth. Writing seems to no longer be a good enough reason alone to teach a course so now we have to sometimes dress up something with the freshest tech. I even taught a course about rhetoric and memes in an effort to freshen up an aging discipline. It felt difficult and unnatural because I was asking my students to write out their ideas and execute them in ways that I had previously never done myself in a comp course. Creating video essays, original memes, etc. all seemed sacrilegious in a writing course. I worried that I could not quite fairly grade that kind of work for writing quality and instead opted for grading effort. This article made me realize that I have definitely given in to a new era of teaching writing but I like to address multimodality in composition as not something completely separate from writing but to call it what it is: fancily veiled composition.

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.

In Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, Jason Palmeri argues that the values of encouraging students to compose in multiple modalities is apparent. As is apparent in the discussion surrounding the Takayoshi and Selfe essay, not everyone agrees, and the discussion is far from settled. Palmeri defines composing as “The selection and ordering of elements” (26). Considering composing or composition as broadly as that makes it reasonable to include modalities beyond just alphabetic (composition) and musical (composing). When referring to Geneva Smitherman’s work Talkin and Testifyin, Palmeri suggests that examining the same work through different modalities, for example reading the text of Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet” speech and then listening to Malcolm X’s actual delivery of the same speech, can deepen the understanding of the speech as one mode will enhance the other by adding more information or a broader perspective.

Palmeri also credits multimodal or multimedia composition as a tool to help students release from their fear of “correctness”, or the grading that is typically associated with making errors in alphabetic compositions. Since many writing instructors do not have the experience grading multimedia projects, assessment and grading could tend to be less rigid and students encounter a “freeing” feeling, allowing them to generate ideas and creatively express themselves.He also suggests that multimodal activity might be employed as an organizational technique to use during the planning process for an alphabetic writing project. In other words, multimodal and “traditional” writing projects need not be mutually exclusive, or at odds. That said… (or written, rather. On a computer)

Also, even if the pathos of some of the responses to the Takayoshi and Selfe essay imparted a sense that some sort of gauntlet was being thrown down, I can absolutely appreciate the arguments of those who don’t want to toss out the composition pedagogy/alphabetic writing baby with the multimodality bath water. (Muddled metaphor, anyone?) On some levels, I agree. While I do see many opportunities for multimodal composition techniques to enhance students learning and creative expression, I also feel we should acknowledge that not every student (or writing instructor, for that matter) will benefit from or be skilled at multimodal communications.

I don’t think the binary between multimodality and writing, though, is a useful way to frame these questions. There is, lurking under this writing/multimodality binary some of the same long-disputed assumptions about writing that underlie the literacy/orality binary. There are also questions of power in relation to language and modality, in the oft-iterated new version of the “Johnny can’t write” argument: “what is the use of focusing on different modalities if my students can’t write?!” It is worth noting the particulars of this question, within which context(s) it is put forth, by whom, and in what position of power, to be self-appointed arbiter who can and cannot write, and what is and is not “correct” meaning-making.

Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print.

Another binary in most discussions in writing studies about multimodal work: it’s assumed we are all referring to digital and non-digital writing, when in fact multimodality encompasses much more (body language, woodwork, sculpture, crochet, performance art, etc.). Just thought these old book covers from the 80s would be an apt multimodal addition to the post. 🙂

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.