Back to Now, 2009

Originally, my paper was just that, a traditional academic essay in the form of a Word document. But now it has morphed into something else, just as my experiences with student producers have grown and developed over the course of just a couple of years.

Creating an electronic text out of this paper has enabled me to see my journey in a hypertextual way. I've been able to look back and re-envsion my narrative in a way that moves through time, topic and experience. More than anything, the newly electronic form of the narrative illustrates my feeling that this is an ongoing journey, a work in progress.

Every semester opens up a new opportunity for my students to surprise me with their technological savvy, their critical observations, and their desire to enact social change through their multimodal expressions. And every semester I am faced with new challenges and obstacles that my students and I must overcome as we go through this learning process.

A couple of significant changes have taken place since I wrote this teacher narrative two years ago:

1. I have completed almost all of my coursework for a PhD in rhetoric and composition
2. I went from teaching at the third largest university in the state of Georgia, to a much smaller state college located in more remote area in North Georgia.


The fact that I've almost completed my coursework for my PhD puts me in a different scholarly position than where I was two years ago. When I first wrote this piece, I was nominally aware of the scholarship in the field of new media and composition, but I did not have nearly the resources that I now have on my shelves (both literally and figuratively).

While I feel that I've included some of the most important names in the field (Bolter, for example), I now have more confidence in the theoretical and pedagogical resources that are out there as I continue along on this journey.

Because I have moved to a different institution, I have found the need to re-organize my syllabi and fit my methods of teaching with a different curriculum and a different teaching system. For example, the textbook I like to use, Good Reasons, has yet to be put on the list of approved textbooks where I am teaching now. This is not to say that I do not plan on submitting it for approval, but when I started at Dalton State in January of this year, I had to make do with the textbook I was provided.

In spring of 2009, I had to change the multimedia assignment in all my classes because I was still going through a transitional process at my new institution. No longer was I only teaching 1101 courses within themed learning communities. I found myself teaching literature-based 1102 courses for the first time, as well as one section of World Literature.

Each multimedia assignment had to be reconfigured and based on the focus of the course and the writing my students had produced. Although my students were not specifically producing proposal arguments in their videos, they successfully adapted their own writing or the writing of others to the screen.

On the video page, I have included various examples of student-produced multimedia texts, along with brief descriptions of when the video was produced and some of the successes and shortcomings of the production.

I hope you will enjoy viewing these student-produced multimedia texts, and see them as a valuable extension of the writing process. Every semester I am impressed with the work of my students, and every semester I learn and grow with them. The student videos . . .

I plan on continuing my research on the use of multimedia texts in the composition classroom, and I hope you will check back in with me to see the developments of my scholarship and practice as

The journey continues . . . >>