Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

12. Going Multimodal: Programmatic, Curricular, and Classroom Change

282 C h a pte r 1 2 Going Multimodal Programmatic, Curricular, and Classroom Change Chanon Adsanatham, Phill Alexander, Kerrie Carsey, Abby Dubisar, Wioleta Fedeczko, Denise Landrum, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Heidi McKee, Kristen Moore, Gina Patterson, and Michele Polak In essence, multimodality lets the many-faceted world we live in be more accurately represented and analyzed. We experience life and learn through many different avenues and to try to confine our work to one, namely text, can constrict the possibilities immensely . —Zach Burns, Kenton Butcher, and Dirk Long, undergraduate students (Conference on College Composition and Communication presentation, March 2007) As the students note in this epigraph, we do not live in a monomodal world. Rather, we experience the world and communicate through multiple modalities. “To confine” students to learning in only one mode, typically the textual mode in first-year writing courses, indeed limits students ’ understanding and creative potential—a point that has reemerged in considerations of education and the teaching of writing.1 Instead, introducing students early in their college careers to the different ways of making meaning using a given mode and to a consideration of the contrastive affordances of other modes as they compose leads them to a Going Multimodal  283 deeper understanding of modality—that is, toward learning “the functional grammar” of modes, as the New London Group (2000) describes it.2 Furthermore, to use the term of Mary Leigh Morbey and Carolyn Steele (see chapter 10 in this edited volume), such multimodal literacy can enable students eventually to develop “metamodal mastery,” “the ability to work across different modes,” to understand semiotic complexity, and to create hybrid genres that reach across disciplinary and academic and popular boundaries. Given the increased complexity and importance of multimodality for learning and communication, the Composition Program at Miami University initiated programmatic, curricular, and classroom changes in 2005 to promote the teaching and learning of multimodal composition. In a dialectical and parallel process we also created the Digital Writing Collaborative (DWC), a network of teachers and students whose mission is to develop and sustain a culture and community of digital writing, learning, and teaching in all areas of English studies, especially in composition . In this chapter we discuss the process and elements of institutional change needed to initiate and sustain a digital composition program —from building alliances across campus to integrating the teaching and learning of multimodal digital composition into our first-year composition curriculum, classroom practices, and teacher training. We open by providing an overview of writing instruction and teacher preparation at Miami, followed by an account of how we worked from this base to develop a digital writing curriculum. We next present some examples of multimodal assignments and narratives of teaching specific modalities. We conclude with a brief summary of the ongoing developments of our program, now in its sixth year, and reflect on the challenges of assessing multimodal compositions and of sustaining digital writing programs. The Programmatic Level: The Foundations and Conditions for Change Miami’s first-semester, rhetorically focused writing curriculum has included a space for multimodality for the better part of a decade, although we had no digital classrooms to explicitly support multimodal composing until our initiative to revise the program in 2005–2006. At that time the standard curriculum, laid out with detailed pedagogy and assignments in a four-hundred-page teacher’s guide, included five recursive sequences organized around a common theme: autoethnography (critical analysis of one’s experience, history, and beliefs in relation to the course 284  Adsanatham et al. theme); rhetorical analysis; argument and research; design your own project ; and reflection. With an emphasis on the importance of considering audience, purpose, and appropriate form, the fourth sequence provided a capstone experience of rhetorical knowledge: Students selected, planned, and composed—either individually or collaboratively—an intensive project of their own choosing. Even before our digital initiative, some students pushed their writing outside the bounds of the traditional essay, creating multimodal projects, such as CDs of musical compositions, brochures with visual images, web pages, and documentary videos. In short, students were already leading us into multimodality—and digital multimodality—before we developed digital classrooms and consciously set out to revise our curriculum to be even more explicitly multimodal.3 Our current curriculum includes five interrelated inquiries: self-inquiry/ initial reflection, textual inquiry/rhetorical analysis, issue inquiry/public issue argument, media inquiry/remediation, and e-portfolio inquiry/final reflection. Historically, our program at...