Once upon a time, i had my students use this video as source material for a writing activity.
the prompt
“SUli talks about the many ways a person might become educated. he also says that people should not solely rely on a system of education to make themsmart. Explain how this argument might be applied to how students are taught to write. Think about the emphasis placed on academic essays and if they have value outside of school.”
the problem(S)
Although I always had a sense for the topic of my dissertation, it took a few years as a doctoral student to narrow the focus. As many times as I tried to eliminate writing pedagogy, it would only reanimate as the framework for my project’s research questions. After writing a few conference proposals, presenting my work, and facilitating how to teach FYC workshops, I finally accepted that writing pedagogy was my thing. Not to mention that my dissertation project did not require an IRB, because it “determin[ed] merit, worth, or value” for the FYC curriculum I proposed, instead of focusing on a population of human subjects. I have to admit, this decision still befuddles me. My students and their work determine if the DFA to FYC is worthy of the writing program at Wayne State University. Both the success and failures of the curriculum hinge on the ways it impacts students enrolled in the course. Regardless, I had a problem, and I was going to try and solve it.
When I admit that writing pedagogy was my thing, I should have clarified that multimodal writing pedagogy was my thing. Holding a bachelor’s degree in art history and being forever fascinated with visual rhetoric, my pursuit of all things multimodal gained traction during my doctoral coursework. Reading the scholarship of Cheryl Ball, Kristin Arola, Jody Shipka, Anne Wysocki, Gunther Kress, Cynthia Selfe, Diana George and Jason Palmieri encouraged me to continue developing ideas for multimodal writing curricula and testing it in FYC the classroom. Never being one to follow the rules, I had a history of being the unconventional high school English teacher in my department way back when. Using what I knew to work in my own past experiences in tandem with the theories and practical matter documented throughout a growing bibliography, I had more than a few problems to work out!
many students do not like to write.
many students do not feel confident about their writing.
many students do not do their writing assignments.
many students do not see the value of a writing course.
This list is not undisputed fact, which is why I said, “many students.” I have understood these statements to be anecdotally true over my 15 years in and out of classrooms (both secondary and post-secondary). The theory that I proposed was that writing students needed opportunities to be seen and heard in their work. They needed to be given flexibility and agency in order to combat their persistent problems with finding meaning in the work and motivation to do it. I hypothesized that using a design-focused approach to first-year writing (DFA to FYC) would provide the kind of flexibility and agency that I believed was missing for students. I would also use a multimodal framework to develop the DFA to FYC curriculum and implement it in my courses at Wayne State University.
but there was another problem
I not only had to define a problem to take up in the dissertation, but also solve the problem of how to take it up in a project. I could not picture myself writing a traditional dissertation, which only became increasingly complicated by my need to walk the walk. Why would I write a formal, text-based document if that was the very thing that I believed stifled writing students from productivity, creativity and meaningfulness?
