Any educator would agree, I think, that course planning is a perpetual exercise of trial and error. For me, this has been especially true when it comes to finding innovative and dynamic ways to engage students in reading, thinking, and writing about academic texts. Part of the challenge in my case is that I teach about language, a social practice about which everyone has an opinion, and media, a ubiquitous mechanism of social interaction. Abstract ideas about what language and media are and how people use them are so naturalized that it can be difficult to facilitate critical consciousness of them, let alone their deconstruction through the discipline of anthropology. Since starting the WAC fellowship, I’ve been learning about how to encourage deep engagement with the course material through consistent and diverse writing assignments. As I prepare to teach about language and media again next semester, I’ve been thinking specifically about the affordances of multimodality in the thinking and writing process, especially after almost two years of teaching and learning online due to the pandemic.
Over the past couple years, I’ve taught a class called Texting & Talking, a linguistic and media anthropology course that explores the differences between face-to-face and mediated communication, and the role of media in language and vice versa. We study everything from radio talk to gossip columns to breaking up with your partner via social media. As you might imagine, students usually have lots to say about these topics. Our in-class discussions are usually quite lively and students often share interesting personal anecdotes about how they and their communities use language on and offline (which I welcome and value!). However, I’ve noticed that this level of deep engagement does not always translate the students’ formal writing assignments, in which I ask them to decipher and make arguments through anthropological concepts. This has been an ongoing struggle for me as I teach, revise, and teach again.
In an effort to address this disconnect towards the end of my first semester teaching the course, I switched things up and created a final assignment that mirrored a typical final research paper, but that could be completed in any modality the student chose. I provided examples, such as a formal presentation, a letter, a podcast episode, a video essay, a recorded conversation between students, a face-to-face conversation with me, a series of Tweets, or a typical written assignment, but the students were encouraged to propose other modalities that aligned with their preferred method to communicate the information. While there were specific requirements (references to course material, an analysis of a mediated or face-to-face linguistic routine, etc.), the assignment was open-ended and shaped by each student’s interest. My idea was that breaking away from the rigid structure of a final paper might give the students the opportunity to express the clarity I witnessed during class sessions, and I thought this approach modeled what I preached about complicating certain conventions of language use. Some students ran with the opportunity and crafted interesting and well-developed multimodal research assignments; for others, the open-ended structure and creative invitation caused confusion and anxiety and many ultimately chose to write a typical paper. I realized throughout the process that the assignment was far too unstructured to yield the deep critical engagement I had envisioned, and that I hadn’t provided my students with the proper tools to complete the assignment successfully.
Halfway through the second iteration of the course, the pandemic hit and my course became asynchronous, which presented obvious challenges to constructing a sense of community and creating online space for students to discuss and learn from each other. Although I imagined this would largely happen through written text given the circumstances, I looked for ways to diversify class participation. I found a free, web-based blogging platform called Padlet that ended up being the perfect virtual space for us to interact. Each week I posed two questions to the class, one about that week’s readings and another inviting students to share their personal experiences with the same topic. What was particularly fruitful about using Padlet was that it allows for text, audio, video, and image, and participants can interact through likes and comments. So, although it was a private site that only our class had access to, it looked more like a social media platform than a formal class discussion board. I encouraged my students to lean in to what that meant for their writing on the Padlet; I explicitly allowed for informal writing, emojis, internet slang, memes, TikToks, or any other genre of language that helped the student express their response to the week’s prompt. The results were exciting. The students took the opportunity to be creative in their class participation, and many of the students who were timid in person were more vocal and participatory online. Throughout the semester I was impressed by how this constant engagement with the course material through writing and/or multimodal creation had clear implications on the students’ ability to articulate complex anthropological analyses about media and language. Even so, I was still left with the sensation that I overemphasized informal writing, and my assignments did not encourage enough development in their formal writing skills.
As I prepare the next version of Texting & Talking, which I’ll teach next semester, I am using WAC pedagogy to address my concerns from each of the previous classes in my syllabus design. I’m specifically looking to scaffold the assignments in ways that not only equally prioritize informal and formal writing, but see them as integrally related. To do so, I’ve created two semester-long writing assignments: a reading log, which requires formal writing practice through weekly prompts about the readings, and a media journal, which is designed to practice informal and multimodal writing through ethnographic data collection. The former is basically a formal notebook, where each student will have documented, written engagement with each week’s course material. The latter is an informal and multimodal guided ethnographic field notebook, where the students are asked to provide thick descriptions of their media usage (including screenshots, links, videos, accounts, etc.) throughout the semester. The two combined are the basis for the students’ final assignment, which is an autoethnography about how each student uses mediated and face-to-face language. The reading log will help the students construct the literature review section of the ethnography, and the media journal is the data they will analyze linguistically. I believe these continuous assignments will encourage and incentivize students to prioritize the process of writing over the product and improve their writing throughout the semester as a result. And if they don’t, or not as much as I’d hoped, I’ll have to try again!
WAC pedagogy teaches us how to use writing to promote critical thinking and facilitate deeper student engagement, and provides us with pedagogical tools to implement these ideas in our classrooms. I’m interested in thinking about how multimodal thinking and writing can enhance WAC pedagogy, especially in the context of our current moment when our reliance on mediated forms of communication and knowledge has intensified and our student populations have shifted. In a classroom of digital natives and media addicts (myself included), how can the incorporation of multimodal thinking and writing invite a different kind of student participation? What do we, as educators, have to lose, if anything, by embracing seemingly informal, mediated forms of knowledge production? What might our students manage to gain?
