Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

7. Multimodal Composing, Appropriation, Remediation, and Reflection: Writing, Literature, Media

164 C h a pte r 7 Multimodal Composing, Appropriation, Remediation, and Reflection Writing, Literature, Media Donna Reiss and Art Young In his 2004 talk at the Conference on College Composition and Communication , Gunther Kress described a “revolution in modes of representation ” in which images dominate writing and the medium of the screen is dominant over the book. Concerned that current literacy theories and practice are incomplete, Kress (2003, 35) wrote in Literacy in the New Media Age, that “language alone cannot give us access to the meaning of the multimodally constituted message; language and literacy now have to be seen as partial bearers of meaning only.” We have been exploring Kress’s notions of “incompleteness” and its presumed corollary “completeness” of multimodal messages—what Kress (ibid., 116) calls “ensembles of modes, brought together to realize particular meanings”— together with our students. Although we don’t think of any learning strategy as “complete,” we have discovered through our students’ work with multimodal compositions and accompanying reflections an important access to meaning making that words alone cannot provide. Developed in collaboration with Dickie Selfe, our 1998 collection Elec- Multimodal Composing, Approproation, Remediation, and Reflection  165 tronic Communication Across the Curriculum promoted a communicationsintensive approach to teaching disciplinary courses with a wide range of media and communications technology. We suggested then and continue to suggest now, thirteen years later, a pedagogy where students’ messages are comprised of both words—sometimes analytical, reflective, or personal , especially reflections on their own learning experiences—and alternative expressions in a modality or multiple modalities of their choice. Giving students a wide range of options for developing and publishing their compositions enhances their engagement with the subject matter and empowers them to make creative and rhetorical decisions, to be what Anne Wysocki (2004, 15) has described as “composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality ; such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text—like its composers and readers—doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts.” Thus central to our approach are not only innovative ways of combining and composing texts but rhetorical and multimodal ways of thinking about form and content , genre and purpose. Vital to our pedagogical approach are several precepts: • In the twenty-first century, students’ experience, both scholarly and social, is multimodal, and we are committed to engage them as communicators in writing and other media in ways that relate to and expand their experience of the world. They regularly compose and represent themselves with both words and images on their blogs and social network websites; they connect with each other aurally, orally, textually, in person, and online. They combine collage-like their own compositions with words, images, and movies appropriated and remediated from other sources. At Clemson University, where we teach, laptops are required and the campus is networked wirelessly ; a text messaging system alerts students to dangerous weather and to dangerous incidents. As a result, students are always connected by mobile devices, and we strive for our courses in writing and other disciplines to be included in that network. • We welcome creativity and innovation not limited by our own skills and practices. We admit that we cannot ourselves do everything we invite our students to do—make videos and Flash movies, for example—as ways to express their learning or to teach us and classmates. By composing in ways not available to us, some students provide us and their classmates with insights into the subject matter that would have been otherwise unavailable to us. Giving students choices of modes and media often increases their 166  Donna Reiss and Art Young motivation to learn and to communicate and enables them as both composers and audience to make rhetorical as well as creative decisions, as Cheryl E. Ball and Ryan M. Moeller (2008) have emphasized: “Aesthetic and rhetorical choices, or (as we call it) creative and scholarly choices, must be made in every text. Moreover, the meaning that those creative and scholarly choices engender should be made available for interpretation in every reading of every text.” • We respect the various ways students represent what they think, what they learn, and why they express themselves as they do. Significantly, we seek to understand their perspectives in response to course material, and we value the rhetorical choices they make to persuade, to...