By broadening the choice of composing modalities, I argue that we expand the field of play for students with different learning styles and different ways of reflecting on the world; we provide the opportunity for them to study, think critically about, and work with new communicative modes. Such a move not only offers us a chance to make instruction increasingly effective for those students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, but it also provides an excellent opportunity to make our work increasingly relevant to a changing set of communicative needs in a globalized world.
- Cynthia Selfe, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning”
No longer can students be considered truly educated by mastering reading and writing alone. The ability to negotiate through life by combining words with pictures with audio and video to express thoughts will be the mark of the educated student.
- Elizabeth Daley, “Speaking the Languages of Literacy”
Composition students, especially those considered beginners or novices of the craft, often find themselves struggling to put thought into words, to accurately reflect the flurry of ideas that flood their minds on a two dimensional piece of paper – yet this is what we consistently require them to do. Since the late 19th century educational standards and specialists have dictated that students’ intelligence levels should be judged based on what they produce on a page, but times are (and have been for quite some time) changing. As Kathleen Blake Yancey rightly points out in her 2004 Chair’s Address to colleagues at the Conference on College Communication and Composition:
…today the changes are those of tremors. These are structural changes – global, educational, technological. Like seismic tremors , these signal a reformation in process, and because we exist on the borders of our own tectonic plates – rhetoric, composition, and communication, process, activity, service, and social justice – we are the very center of those tremors (321).
The point Yancey has articulated in this passage is one that has been made by several other scholars in the field and one that is pertinent to my own investigations into writing processes because she clearly notes that we currently exist at a time when the modes of communication are influx. The implication in that statement is that the processes and activities we use to engage and teach students to use language effectively must also be influx, meaning, “we must provide them all available means of persuasion and expression, so that they can function as literate citizens in a world where communications cross geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders and are enriched rather than diminished by semiotic dimensionality” (Selfe, 618).
In order to be good stewards of not only our field but of our institutions, communities, and classrooms, we should be working to integrate multimodal compositions into pedagogical practices. However, it is important to note that while these new forms of composition provide students with more opportunities to take advantage of all of the semiotic tools at their disposal, they do not necessarily need to be privileged over print. In her essay, “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning” Cynthia Selfe (2009) works to dispel this compulsion to make the argument one that pits digital against print, “My goal in this article, then, is not to suggest that teachers focus on either writing or aurality, but rather that they respect and encourage students to deploy multimodal modalities in skillful ways – written, aural, visual” (p. 626). Selfe goes on to point out that this is not an either/or argument but a both/and one; therefore, we should not be arguing against the contributions of writing and print, but rather looking for instances where multimodal compositions might compliment alphabetic ones and vice versa thereby providing students with richer learning experiences. My argument is that this type of convalescence can indeed occur, and the results of my study show that students perceived the entire research writing process in a more positive light due to the integration of a multimodal project aimed at engaging them in the invention stages of the composing process. In other words, the integration of a multimodal composition did not replace the print standard that was privileged by their teacher rather it assisted them in adapting to the traditional mode of academic argumentative writing.