“After reading the experts, reading some more stuff and then reading it all again, I recognized the importance of thinking through how to use words, how to use images and how to use them together to create effective relevant artifacts. so, my next job became how to get students to think about it too.”

SUBHEADING

multimodal pedagogy

Thinking about writing, in light of 21^st century skills, inevitably leads to scholarly conversations about multimodal pedagogy. The turn to aligning literacy (multiliteracies) with the changing landscape of media and communication must be examined as a way to solve a problem implementing multimodal pedagogy to its potential. “Dialogic, multimodal learning creates situated, specific discourse opportunities for student-scholars to enter into academic conversations and affect change, using their own rhetorical voices,” asserts Jeanne L. Bohannon in her 2015 article “Not a Stitch Out of Place: Assessing Student’s Attitudes Towards Multimodal Composing.” In the interests of preparing students to function outside the university setting, compositionists have taken up a number of positions with regard to how multimodality should look in the classroom and most often those processes employ technology (Dobrin, 2011; Leveranz 2016; Wysocki et.al., 2004). What students should be able to do is explicitly addressed in the most recent iteration of the WPA Outcomes Statement for FYC (2014): “adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities.” However, multimodality is much more inclusive than just digitality (Shipka, 2011). As explicated in Khadka and Lee’s collection (2019) many instructors have attempted to implement such practices without much success. Instructors, both new and experienced, have been hesitant as a consequence of inadequate training, lack of resources and equipment, and disciplinary suitedness (Dunn, 2001; Khadka and Lee, 2019; Takayoshi and Self, 2007).  Thus, the seminal and oft cited pedagogy of the New London Group (1996), stating the current need to acknowledge, teach and learn through multiliteracies, has been a slow implementation for scholars. On the other hand, these same scholars have continued their examination of social semiotics, modal affordances, and digitality.  Currently, FYC is still struggling to see multimodality used as a framework, instead of arbitrary assignments. Synthesizing the work of the NLG with a focus on design, a number of composition scholars have been able to frame composing through a process that exceeds alphanumeric text (Ball and Arola, 2018; Marback, 2009; Palmeri 2012; Purdy, 2014).  They claim when writers write, they are designing, especially in the current culture.  The problem-solving process inherent in design thinking, is a way to bridge classroom praxis with value outside the academy (Leveranz, 2016; Orr et.al., 2006; Palmeri, 2012; Purdy, 2014; Shipka, 2011). Despite the many ways that the writing and designing processes align, it is important to note that some scholars have probed at the limitations that design-thinking can effect (Karjaluoto, 2014; Potter, 2007).  Ball and Arola echo the benefits in pedagogical implications, put forth by the NLG, and assert that designing allows writer/designers to be “makers of [their] social futures.” In a 2019 chapter for Exquisite Corpse: Studio Art-Based Writing in the Academy titled,”The Artistry of Composition: Design Thinking in Writing Studies,” Vittorio Rubino concurs, “…through a design-oriented, multiliterate pedagogy, instructors can restore student agency through the act of making.”

visual theory & design

Design-thinking and its rhetorical emphasis becomes much clearer through scholarship that examines visual theory through its applications in writing in the academy. The foremost scholarly conversation centers on the affordances of an image in comparison to a text, or a combination of the two (Mitchell, 1994; Stephens, 1998; Vivian ,2007).  The rhetorical quality of the writing process demands that students think of all available means and subsequently is not exclusive to linguistic practices (Dondis, 1973; Dunn, 2011). Writing for rhetorical purposes calls upon composing processes that are inherently multimodal (New London Group, 1999), so a critical examination of the ways compositionists can reframe such, with considerations beyond merely linguistic features, is important and necessary. As Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) assert, each medium has limitations of meaning, not everything can be realized by language (p.19). Furthermore, in Gombrich’s The Image and the Eye (1960), he acknowledges that there is a power to images in capturing a moment or a feeling that words cannot (p.175).  Kress and Van Leeuwen explain, “language is policed by the academy to be homogenized;” whereas people, on their own, combine and change and make [their]selves understood (p.5). In other words, academic composing has become a practice centered on standards and expectations that are restrictive (and consequently without personal purpose) for students to communicate themselves and their knowledge.  Vittorio Rubino affirms, “students as not only writers, but as composers, are capable of analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, evaluating, and creating not only formal, Standard English alphabetic texts, but also visual means of communication” (p.145). The operations that process how images are perceived and constructed in the mind, is an important topic taken up by Rudolf Arnheim (1969), who declares that perception should not be separated from thinking: “…educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in any field of endeavor” (p.3).  Here, composing in the academy becomes an exercise that draws on the magnitude of looking (what students see, just as importantly as what they want audiences to see in their work).  The visual lens used for writing/designing deemphasizes a reliance on textual language.  Drawing on scholarship that looks at the arbitrary nature of words will help to reify the representational value of visual form as evidenced in Gestalt theory and the Bauhaus (Arnheim, 1969; Dondis, 1973; Lupton, 2000).

bringing stuff together