First Year: 2006

In late August of 2005, just two short weeks after graduating with a master's degree in professional writing, I found myself standing on the other side of the desks at the same institution where I had been a student for many years. This was it. My dream of teaching at the college level had finally become a reality.

I was both thrilled and terrified.

I struggled with establishing credibility--not only playing the part, but looking the part, and coming to terms with my own authority in the classroom. I felt ill-prepared, and on the really bad days, I even felt ill-equipped to command the position that I held in such high regard. I recognized the importance of my role as instructor within the realm of higher education.

I was aware of the impact I could make, and the heavy responsibility of raising my students to the higher-level thinking not only required by institutions of higher education, but also indicative of conscious, critical, responsible global citizens.

I want to give my students the opportunity to delve deeper into the mass media that inundates their lives. I want them to stop swallowing blindly the multiple texts within our consumer-driven society. I want them to be thoughtful consumers, and even more, I want them to be reflective, deliberate producers. This was the foundation of my graduate work in composition and rhetoric. More than anything, I want to redefine literacy skills in my classroom, and give students the chance to evaluate and produce texts that demand their attention and captivate their imagination. I am determined to use multimedia and technology to reach these goals and to successfully integrate the texts of today with the rhetorical traditions of the academy.

Early in my graduate career I became interested in the theories of digital literacy and use of technology in the classroom, not only as an apparatus of instruction, but as a mode for the analysis and production of multimedia student texts. As a result of these interests, I was naturally drawn to KAIROS, the peer-reviewed, online journal dedicated to issues in "Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy." It is there, in the spring 2003 volume, that I found Daniel Anderson's multimedia, multimodal conglomeration entitled "Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum." It is a brilliant and innovative academic publication, representing the non-traditional discourse propelled by KAIROS.

Using multimedia applications on a Mac, Anderson produced a pedagogical piece that integrated fixed and scrolling text, interactive links, digital video, music and still frames. It is a busy, thought-provoking text in design alone, but Anderson goes further by demonstrating his success in allowing students to analyze, produce and edit digital videos as part of the composition process. He successfully argues that in production of multimedia texts, students become more conscious, critical consumers of such texts. I was instantly sold. I knew that I would use digital video production in my own classes, but I was not sure how.

It seems appropriate that I would return now to KAIROS for answers about the use of digital video in composition studies. In " Review of Digital Video Production in Post-Secondary English Classrooms at Three Universities," published by KAIROS in the fall of 2003, Melissa Meeks and Alex Illyasova interview compositionists who are using digital video production in their classrooms; these instructors validate production of digital video as academic text and raise the pedagogical implications of this practice by highlighting the need to explore new avenues of literacy:

Where we don't hesitate is admitting that alphabetic literacy is not enough anymore--for our students or for us as teachers. Although we don't know all the answers to the questions these new media raise, we recognize that digital video has the qualities we are looking for to engage students in combining design, production, and literac(ies) in the classroom . . . digital video allows them to use more than alphabetic (text-based) literacy in their compositions; their familiarity with film, television, and image-saturated culture means that more of what they bring to the classroom counts. Digital video is a challenge we welcome. (1)

In the same article, Cynthia Selfe's use of iMovie and VideoWave in her undergraduate Adolescent Literature class is examined. Selfe uses these applications to "give students a basic introduction to composing in the literacy of movies," and "the goal is to get students playing, thinking, and communicating in different modes" (5). This idea of play, critical thinking and composing in different modes is what draws me to the use of student documentaries in my classroom. Selfe offers valuable advice to instructors embarking on this mission: class

. . . try and maintain a great sense of humor. Unless you are un-humanly lucky, things will go wrong. Part of her success she attributes to her willingness to learn, observe, practice, and try things out. (Meeks and Ilyasova 6)

In reflecting on my first year teaching and using digital video production in my composition classroom, these are comforting words, indeed. >>

Image by James F. Clay