Use the multimodal narrative as an opportunity to teach analysis.

The stories that I chose to include in my audio and video narratives set up a picture of the cultural practices of my family without explicitly telling my audience the meanings these practices defined.  My grandfather’s story of his brother who mail-ordered a guitar from Montgomery Ward’s implicitly said to the audience that his family didn’t live near a city with a large department store and that he couldn’t afford to buy a guitar from a specialty music store.  My mother’s story of my grandfather singing as he plowed with the mule also gave the audience a sense of our rural background.  It even surprised me that in the 1950’s they didn’t have a tractor to use on the farm.  The fact that my mother explained that she and her family always sang “praise songs” and that the background music was my grandfather and her singing some of those songs made clear to audience that ours was a deeply spiritual family.
         As it always true in the case of personal narrative, I took a bit of risk by exposing myself and my cultural practices to my audience.  I believe this risk increased with the use of audio and video composition because audio and video exposes parts of ourselves that can hide behind the written page. And it is important to note that the same will be true of first year composition students. I have always been very self-conscious about my rural south-central Kentucky accent.  I am proud of it because I am proud of my heritage and the people who passed it on to me, but in areas not very far to the north, I have been ridiculed and once even publicly humiliated because a person who heard me speak automatically equated my accent with stupidity. My grandfather’s accent is thicker than mine which meant putting his voice in my narratives opened not only me up for scrutiny but also my family.  It is something I think about every time I play my audio or video narratives for a new audience.
         My religious background was also exposed in the audio piece.  As a graduate student, I considered for a long time how a group of scholars would take my mother’s talk about her father plowing the field and singing praise songs to the top of his voice because, “It was just him and God out there.” I decided that in order for the narrative to be “real” it would have to include this part of me.  Those songs and the spirituality that is expressed by my family in singing those songs cannot be extracted from my musical past.  It is part of a cultural practice that truly defines me.  Bruner says that, “The Self as narrator not only recounts but justifies” (121), and although I did risk exposure through audio and visual composition, I also used these pieces to justify my own and my family’s cultural practices.

Even though I made the decision to take the risks, less confident first year students, especially those who may not be as comfortable playing the academic game, may not be willing to do so.  Students should be offered multiple examples of multimodal narratives and encouraged to think about and discuss the effects of their choices.  Cindy Selfe’s website offers numerous examples, and there are other sites on the web that also offer good examples. For the students who do decide to take the risks, the class may have more emotional responses to these pieces than they would a traditional print essay, so be ready to remind them that their responses need to be useful to the composer.  As with any type of response exercise, it is always useful to discuss what constitutes a useful response before beginning the exercise.