The Contexts of Multimodality and New Media

Teaching the BIG text: Relationships to | in | among media in a First Year Writing Program
Joyce Walker

A cultural-history activity theory-based (CHAT) perspective can alter how we think about, plan research for, and investigate people and their literate activities. While CHAT has most often been discussed in the context of how we study literate practice, Jody Shipka (2008) and others have also discussed the dramatic changes such a perspective can create in the way we plan and teach introductory writing courses at the university level. This presentation considers the development of the First Year Writing Program at Western Michigan University, and our efforts to teach students a more nuanced understanding of the complex factors that shape the conception, production, distribution, and reception of texts. Joyce Walker will explore a range of learning situations and composition projects designed to disrupt and make visible the embedded (and therefore often invisible) categories, systems, and folk-classifications that shape our understanding of classroom-based writing. Additionally, her discussion of multimodal composition expands the definition of such texts as primarily digitally based, and moves toward a more complex understanding of how issues such as distribution and spatial relationships can play into our understanding of multimodal composing strategies.

Making Who is a Writer?  Writing New Media for “The National Conversation on Writing”
Pete Vandenberg, DePaul University

Since well before Kathleen Yancy’s groundbreaking 2004 Chair’s Address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key," academics trained as writing specialists have been producing multimodal texts.  A key thematic genre of such texts functions to expand notions of authorship practices—or writing in its verb form—beyond the inscription of alphabetic characters.  The design potential of such texts, when imagined by and for other writing specialists, remains constrained by a discourse that depends on alphabetic writing, the monomodal, as a standard by which the multimodal is to be understood and valued.  “Writers” have difficulty talking about multimedia without talking, thinking about, and enacting writing.

Peter Vandenberg edited Who is a Writer?, the 24-minute video produced by the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Network for Media Action, intended to kick off the organization’s National Conversation on Writing (http://comppile.tamucc.edu/NCoW/).  Drawing on this experience as an example, Vandenberg will discuss the paradox outlined above as a productive tension—the deeply embedded predisposition to understand multimodal production in terms provided by training in writing, and the dis/advantages associated with a conception of audience similarly disciplined.  Recognizing this presentation at this conference as precisely the occasion that produces such productive tension, he may or may not attempt to disrupt it.  

Converging Assumptions of Reading New Media
Cheryl E. Ball

Continuing the discussion of tensions addressed by the second presenter, this third presentation will focus on how authors of new media texts regularly draw on both scholarly and creative genres to construct their arguments. In so doing, they bridge disciplinary boundaries that have split English departments in the past, such as high :: low, literature :: composition, and popular :: academic discourse. In this presentation, I will examine, then complicate, the binary form :: content as its presented in new media scholarship. My presentation will show that new media texts can provide a convergence between binaries in English studies and how this convergence can be carried out in our research and teaching.