By Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, PWR 182 Faculty Mentor and Stephanie Kerschbaum, PWR Director
We wanted to take the opportunity to showcase two courses that provide significant opportunities for students to engage multimodal composing: Henry Christopher’s English 131 (Composition) course, which includes an assignment sequence centered on zine-making, and BrittNEY Frantece’s English 381 (Advanced Composition) course, which focused on comedy writing.
The syllabi, assignments, and select materials from these courses, which students have given permission to share, are available via Sharepoint when you log in with your UW NetID.
To put this blog post together, we spent some time with materials Henry and BrittNEY shared, then talked about what we found so exciting about Henry’s and BrittNEY’s courses. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
Key takeaways and observations from Henry’s and BrittNEY’s syllabi and assignments
Kimberlee: Looking at these materials, I was excited by the way they help students get at the distinction between genre and mode that can be challenging in multimodal teaching and composing.
Anytime you’re doing multimodality, students tend to conflate genre and mode. With these classes, you have the genre of the zine and the genre of comedy, and I think these two courses highlight how particular genres foreground or make available certain modes that people can work in, and thus invite students’ attention to the kinds of modes they want to use to make rhetorical appeals. This can mean, as in BrittNEY’s course, students can say, “well, I’m going to be doing comedy–how can I effectively engage in the modes the genre makes available?”
Stephanie: I want to pick up on this point in the context of Henry’s zine approach. The assignment asks students to create a zine, but zines have all kinds of other specific subtypes and there are many different approaches to zines and they’re made with all kinds of different materials. But at the same time, because students are creating a zine, that already means they have to deal with the constraints that come up around zine-making.
For me, both Henry’s zine-making assignment sequence and BrittNEY’s comedy writing syllabus show the value of asking students to collectively work with a particular type of multimodal performance or text and to explore the possibilities within that space.
Kimberlee: I agree, and I think another thing that’s really useful about looking at these models is that combination of direction and challenges.
I noticed particularly in BrittNEY’s class that the first few weeks were all about building community in the classroom, building a space that would feel safe for students to perform in and take different kinds of risks. To me that is a huge feature of this course. The other piece of scaffolding that she shared with us is the assignment where students made a counter argument in the genre that the source argument was done in to think about what argument means in different genres.
This assignment takes me back to the question of how you use the modal affordances that genres privilege to create your counter argument. It also feeds into the class’s focus on comedy because so much about comedy has to do with critique or counter argument–or it can, depending on the type of comedy you like. So I think the assignment involves students not only in thinking about genre and mode together and working in modes that may not be familiar to them, but also in the larger question, “What do I want my comedy to be about and how would I put it together?”
Stephanie: Yes! And, you know, in Henry’s zine assignment sequence–the second major project of the course–the first short assignment involves groups of students working together to design a masthead for their zine, a place where potential submitters might go to learn about the zine and what kind of submissions the zine is looking for. Based on the mastheads, members of the class submit rough drafts to populate each others’ zines as their second short assignment in the sequence, submitting to each other while also fielding drafts from classmates. This is such an inventive way to design a meaningful publishing opportunity.
Kimberlee: Yeah, and when you have them submitting to each other, you have the stakes of trying to understand, “well what exactly is the vision for this publication I’m submitting to?” Also, on the other side of it, “what is my editorial vision,” and assessing how particular submissions fit within that vision and requesting revisions to better connect the piece to both editorial vision and publication space.
While I’m at it, let me also raise two more connections between these projects. One is a “DIY” quality in terms of asking students to tap into individual investments, passions, and experiences. The second is the way they both engage with spatial rhetorics and modes in different ways.
Zines invite students to engage the space on the page, how text and images are arranged together, and with physical zines in particular you often have people wrestling with spatiality and materiality of paper and how it folds, so the page becomes this interactive thing.
The comedy performance also picks up on those gestural modes and tactility of space and performance. These can include interactivity with the audience, bodily movements, and speech and pacing. Students can, perhaps, ask things such as, “where do I put my pauses? How long are those pauses? When am I delivering information rapidfire so that the spaces between chunks of information are faster-paced?” These spatial rhetorics invite attention to modes on a page, on a website, maybe in a room, and consideration of how space interacts with time.
Student agency and composer identity
Stephanie: We talk a lot in PWR about students making their own composing choices and being able to communicate about them and build metacognition about those choices, as our course outcomes indicate, such as the first outcome which includes the bullet point, “assessing and articulating the rationale for and effects of composing choices.”
One of the things I admire so much about both of these courses is how they do a lot of work to give students support, knowledge, and community that all enable students to navigate this kind of choice-making while at the same time offering some boundaries. The courses define the kind of composing students are going to do while leaving a lot of space for the composing process to be incredibly creative, adaptive, and generative.
Sometimes what happens when students get an assignment that leaves the question of genre and modality open, it can be overwhelming. And students have to wrestle, sometimes in unproductive or frustrating ways, with how to build on prior knowledge to select from potential composing choices. I learned that the hard way. (laughs)
Kimberlee: We all learned that the hard way! (laughing)
Stephanie: It’s a balance that we have to strike: students need to activate prior knowledges to identify and work with composing choices, but if they don’t already have some of those prior knowledges, which can include things like knowing how to use a particular technology or software or having access to particular kinds of materials and resources, then we have to ask ourselves how they are given opportunities to build that knowledge in our courses.
Kimberlee: Yes, it’s that idea of supporting and foregrounding students’ agency while giving them the tools to enact that agency by actively putting a text together.
You know, this brings up another point: these are two different levels of classes, too, one in which you have students who are probably further along in their university careers taking BrittNEY’s 381 course, and who may feel more agency than the first and second year students taking Henry’s 131.
What I found really interesting about BrittNEY’s 300-level class and the comedy show is that idea of pulling people into a genre that they may not have done before. The students perhaps have never thought of themselves as performers. But we all have to perform in public in all kinds of ways. We all find ourselves needing to capture people’s attention through those modes that unfold in physical space, or that are projected out over digital space, and I think that this class can help students recognize this kind of agency in building skills and learning to do things that they may not have thought that they could do before.
Stephanie: Yes! I think this speaks to the question of wanting students to be comfortable and encouraging them to explore projects that they may not already think are in their wheelhouse. Sometimes you have a student you just want to say, “Yes! Go do the thing!” and you just let them loose with their ideas, but other times you want to nudge a student into building capacities and skills that they aren’t already comfortable with but which they can build familiarity and comfort with over time.
Kimberlee: We talk about writing as a process of discovery. Maybe we can describe multimodal composing as a process of discovering an investment in something that you didn’t think you cared about before.
Stephanie: I love that, multimodal composing as a process of discovery!
Kimberlee: Yeah, it specifically brings to mind a conversation I had with a first-year student yesterday who is probably like the students in Henry’s 131 course. A lot of first-year students are carrying narratives of their identities as writers that came from previous contexts, and those externally projected identities can be doing all kinds of work–both positive and negative. A lot of students’ self-perceptions of who they are as writers developed around essays –or speeches, or Powerpoint presentations, or whatever– but mostly a fairly narrow set of textual production.
I wonder how changing up the kinds of textual production that we’re asking students to engage in can help disrupt those writerly narratives they carry and potentially open up a much richer relationship to writing. The ways that PWR courses like Henry’s and BrittNEY’s engage students in genres produced broadly across different kinds of spaces is really valuable to helping them develop new senses of themselves as composers.
On assessing multimodal projects
Kimberlee: It’s important to take up the question of assessment as we conceptualize multimodal projects in our courses. For instance, in these two cases we see that there’s a way students need to perform or produce the project, but then there’s also documenting that needs to happen for grading purposes.
If you’re doing a comedy show, for example, it’s a time-based medium, and the time goes by quickly. In these cases, I want to consider how a performance unfolded in actual time. So when I grade, one approach might be for me to say, “Okay, it’s a time based medium, so the student is going to have to think about the comedy performance, and they’re going to have to put in pauses, and they’re going to have to organize their materials in ways that there are certain sort of peaks and valleys. I want to be able to take in the moments that the person really wants to get across in real time, and I consider real time in my assessment, because that’s how I would take in the genre.”
But part of what I also want my assessment to be doing is giving feedback on uses of the modal affordances. Hence, one option might be recording a performance that happens in physical or virtual space. That way, I can rewind. In this case, then, I might use my assessment to talk about a certain timestamp and say, “Okay, here’s where you effectively use pacing shifts.” Doing this means that my assessment time is almost always longer than the performance time.
Stephanie: To add to what you’re saying, Kimberlee, about considerations for grading that might affect the design of the assignment itself and how it is submitted and shared, we can think about how recording apparatuses–whether a video camera in the classroom, someone’s cell phone, or a zoom recording that’s turned on–all have different ways of capturing a scene that participate in the meaning-making process.
Kimberlee: Yeah, and then the question of where student creations live is a really good one. Often the creations may have to live in several places in order for us to assess them. For instance, there can be zines that people have made in a physical form, but then they have to scan them or convert them somehow to a digital form in order to be graded on Canvas.