TheCs

The Cs: What the Confernece on College Composition and Communication has to say about trends in composition

Portfolio Contents

Home

The Background
Guiding Questions

Portfolios, Technologies,
and the Composition Classroom
EPortfolios
Why Portfolios?

Outlining Multimodal Composition
Enhanced Writing

Parallel Educational Tools
First Parallel
Second Parallel
Third Parallel
Fourth Parallel

New Directions: Into Infinity (Expanding Ideas)

Tangent Line 1
Tangent Line 2
Tangent Line 3

Final Reflections

References

Students are now expected to produce hardcopy texts with pictures in them, brochures, fliers, PowerPoints (or similar presentation documents), different types of webtexts, even PhotoShop documents and film clips or short movies, etc, in college composition courses.

In 2004, CCCC published the “Position statement on teaching, learning, and assessing writing in digital environments.” The committee states, “The focus of writing instruction is expanding: the curriculum of composition is widening to include not one but two literacies: a literacy of print and a literacy of the screen. In addition, work in one medium is used to enhance learning in the other.”

Although the committee speaks directly to digital composition, the focus is more multimodal in nature; however, instructors must recognize that all multimodal composition is not digital—a misunderstanding many instructors make.

Remixing Culture

The CCCC position statement comes into the field at a time when Western society recognizes itself as a multimodal/visually communicative society. Society expects students to be multimodal writers, but students should learn to produce the above mentioned texts not just because of social expectations, but because multimodal composition affords students a new lens with which to view their world and their work (Vie, 2008; Selfe, 2007; Yancey, 2004).

According to WIDE Research Center (2009), “It is the networked computer, the spaces to which networked computers provide access, and the public ways in which individuals are writing that are together changing the cultural landscape.” Students shouldn’t only be working with multimodal compositions because employers want them to or society pressures them to; instead, students should be exploring new means of composing because students are part of a new writing public (Yancey, 2004). Helping students navigate multimodal composition enhances how they understand literate practices to include not just words, but also images, sounds, graphics, motion, and other forms of digital media (Blair & Takayoshi, 1997).