When designing our online composition courses, we used the Council of Writing Program Administrators Outcomes Statement (WPA OS) as the curricular foundation. In addition to the five areas of the WPA OS (rhetorical knowledge; critical thinking, reading, and writing; process; knowledge of conventions; and composing in electronic environments), we incorporated the eight habits of mind (curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition) from the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” (NCTE, WPA, NWP, 2011). These outcomes offer sound pedagogical goals for first-year composition classes, conducive with a multiliteracies pedagogy. Together, these outcomes give students what the New London group calls a “metalanguage—a language for talking about language, images, texts, and meaning-making interactions” (1996, p. 77).
The WPA Outcomes Statement and eight habits of mind offer students the ability to identify learning that addresses multimodality explicitly and implicitly. Outcomes such as “Understand and exploit the differences in the rhetorical strategies and in the affordances available for both print and electronic composing processes and texts” specifically address the types of considerations students must make when considering the use of multimodal elements. For example, by choosing to develop an electronic document, an author may elect to embed sound, hyperlinks, video, images, and audio, whereas a print document would limit the writers to alphabetic text and images. At the same time, other outcomes—such as “Respond to the needs of different audiences,” “Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations,” and “Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation”—are conducive to multimodality. While they don’t specifically address multimodality, they articulate the knowledge we hope students acquire from working with multimodal projects; therefore, these outcomes seem ideal for a multiliteracies pedagogy.
One aspect of the WPA OS that significantly shaped the course was the use of digital multimodal composition in response to the section “Rhetorical Knowledge” within the WPA OS. For each writing assignment, students were provided a rhetorical situation within the writing overview and were invited to select a specific audience and appropriate genre. For example, one assignment asked students to develop a project examining the history of family traditions. Once a student identified a tradition, she had to consider an audience that would be interested in this piece, determining the best method for delivery and type of text to develop. This kind of critical thinking required students to apply understanding of the rhetorical concepts of medium, genre, and tone based on the audience and purpose in response to the rhetorical situation from the section of the WPA OS titled “Rhetorical Knowledge” (See Appendix A for a sample assignment). Much of this decision-making challenged the students’ previous writing experiences, which consisted of a text-based essay as the genre and teacher as the audience. Students were encouraged to use digital tools to create their projects, which concurrently addressed the learning outcomes identified within the “Composing in Electronic Environments” section of the WPA OS. Additionally, students had to rely on the learning outcomes provided in the habits of mind when making decisions about audience, purpose, genre, and medium, specifically the habits of creativity, flexibility, and metacognition.
While we focused on the WPA OS and habits of mind when designing curriculum, we also had to consider the curricular design of the digital course and how students could engage with each other and interact with faculty members through the course learning management system. The following section describes the structure and arrangement of our curriculum, illustrating what a course might look like when using a multiliteracies pedagogy based on the WPA Outcomes Statement and habits of mind.