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Updating an Old Standard: Laura's Perspective First, some context to make clear how multimodality surfaces in our teacher-training course, Teaching College Writing (TCW). Because it’s required, associated with practice, and the one consistent contribution that composition studies makes at the graduate-level across the nation, TCW is an inherently conflicted site. The freighted history and sense of urgency make it especially hard to envision TCW as a space for innovation. The real or imagined demands of the course are considerable. In addition to functioning as a comprehensive site for all things composition-related, TCW has the added pressure of preparing and supporting novice teachers in a compressed amount of time. At the University of Cincinnati, this pressure is tempered somewhat because in addition to TCW, our students take a two-quarter practicum focused on leading discussion, conducting peer review, and assessing student writing, among other pedagogical matters. These issues, grounded in theories of writing and teaching, spill over into TCW, informing students’ uptake of theory and its bearing on daily classroom experiences, creating opportunities for reflective practice. TCW is endowed with authority and power in most programs because it articulates how writing is to be envisioned, instructed, and practiced. It’s a way of codifying a program and inculcating newcomers in how to understand and implement writing and teaching. TCW functions as a framing device—an ideological orientation to the field as well as an act of composition, a way of making a narrative and a “we” who occupies it. In my version of the course, we devote some time to the study and practice of writing and composing in light of developments associated with new media and multimodality. Other readings include important work like Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” and Elbow’s rejoinders, units on response methods, theories of audience, teacher and student identity, and varying pedagogical approaches as well as sobering accounts of the field’s formation by the likes of Connors and Crowley. Thus, the course situates multimodality and its rhetorical production and delivery in conversation with long-standing points of orientation in composition studies discourse. More than a site for consuming histories, theories, and practices, my version of TCW has begun to align more self consciously with current practices of rhetorical production, particularly with writing as “epistemic, performative, multivocal, multimodal, multimediated,” to borrow from Andrea Lunsford (171). For the multimodal assignment, I asked students to create what I called an “exploratory multimodal project,” accompanied by a rationale, about any aspect of writing instruction that interested them (see Appendix A and Figure 1 for the original assignment description). What I did not expect was that this assignment would yield powerful inquiries about teacher identity and development rooted in the often ineffable moments of teacher performance—i.e., being caught off guard by a student’s comment, investigating one’s own biases toward non-standard forms of English uttered during class discussion, employing humor in an effort to create likability, connection, and trust. These examples, drawn from student work, were anecdotal and reflective—what I expected—but many were also critically engaged studies of teaching that captured classroom experience with often unvarnished immediacy. They did so through video, audio, and image, modalities of presentation that could not make secondary the physical aspects of teaching and learning. We heard shaky voices and laughter; we saw the teacher centered at the front of the room busily instructing; and we viewed images of idealized students composed to dramatize the world we imagine our classrooms to be in advance of our actual arrival. In other words, as the projects began to exceed my initial intentions, I learned that something had been missing in my approach to teacher-training: a method by which to document and develop critical knowledge about teachers-in-motion. |
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I should note that while I hadn’t originally designed the assignment to be an investigation of teaching performance, as is clear in the original description, the student projects have convinced me to gear future iterations of the assignment explicitly in this direction. Rather than asking students to “experimen[t] with visual and/or digital tools”—a description that equates multimodality with electronic technologies, limiting the potential forms the projects might take—the assignment will henceforth encourage students to examine some aspect of their teaching performance, positioning themselves as objects of study in the classroom so as to work at the intersection of the theory we’re reading and the practice of teaching. |
figure 1 (04:30) |
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Most of the methods of self-analysis and intellectual engagement that I had required of students up until this point assumed alphabetic text as the default modality. While a case study of a student writer, a series of response papers, or a reflective teaching journal do not necessarily preclude students from composing in a range of media or addressing the performance dimensions of teaching, they also do not particularly invite them. This is especially so since such assignments are typically conceptualized through print conventions like page requirements, acceptable margins, and preferred line-spacing. Judging by scholarly conversations, textual forms of meaning-making, often culminating in a teaching portfolio or notebook, tend to dominate assignments in composition teacher-training courses with the exception, perhaps, of role-playing activities (see, for example, Wilhoit). Rosemary (Gates) Winslow makes this point very clearly in her essay, which begins with the injunction that “teachers of writing must write” (315). Likewise, E. Shelley Reid’s recent essay, “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing” is based on the premise that writing is the most relevant mode of intellectual work for teacher-training: “Writing pedagogy classes need to provide writing experiences that allow students to experience productive, guided difficulty in writing—and thus to become true learners in the field” (W198). Such experiences, she writes, “will increase teachers’ empathy with students” (W198) and permit an enactment of “composition pedagogy as a discipline and a performance that can be studied, theorized, debated, assessed, researched, and deliberately revised” (W200). We agree that writing is a valuable tool for teacher-training, but we see it as one of several modalities for grappling with the difficult questions, legitimate concerns, and affective dissonances that inevitably emerge for new teachers. More specifically, when conceiving pedagogy as performance, as Reid does, other modalities for analysis and reflection are warranted and necessary. While writing performance is certainly a powerful basis upon which new teachers connect with their students, it is not the only kind of performance that matters in the classroom. The extra-linguistic aspects of teaching— having to do with how we instantiate ourselves as teachers in classroom spaces—are vital sources of investigation for novice teachers. And, building on Cynthia Selfe’s recent argument in support of multimodal tools for student learning, this essay illustrates that teachers too “need opportunities to realize that different compositional modalities carry with them different possibilities for representing multiple and shifting patterns of identity, additional potential for expression and resistance, expanded ways of engaging with a changing world” (“Movement” 30). Existing research on multimodality, much of which encourages expanding composition resources for students (e.g., Dunn; Shipka, “Multimodal”; Yancey), can and should be extended to literacy educators. To borrow from Selfe, such a move would “expand the field of play for [teachers] with different learning styles and differing ways of reflecting on the world” and offer teachers opportunities “to study, think critically about, and work with new communicative modes” (Selfe, “Movement,” 644). In the following two sections, Hannah and Liv describe their multimodal projects, offering examples of “new communicative modes” ripe for documenting teaching as performance.
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