The ideal composition course would encourage critical thinking about rhetorical strategies and prepare students for work environments for which they need to be adequately prepared to be successful. Unfortunately, most composition courses at both the secondary and college level continue to place value in traditional essays almost exclusively. Educators might be feeding into this for many reasons, including lack of familiarity with digital tools, limited resources for students to use, nostalgia for the traditional transfer of knowledge via paper texts. The institutions themselves are slow to change and reluctant to embrace multimodal texts as valuable in their own right and reliable in content.
This reluctance to engage students with the rhetorical strategies necessary to create and read multimodal texts results in graduates who are woefully underprepared for the work force. Work environments in the 21st century require the ability to create not only alphabetic texts, but the complex "texts" used by everyone from the average person uploading videos on YouTube to the marketing director who determines the blurb and thumbnail in a sidebar. The traditional composition course does not teach the rhetorical possibilities of multimodal texts simply because it does not recognize that the definition of literacy has changed.
My project will examine the existing pedagogical research on digital tools and suggest immediately applicable strategies for secondary and college composition teachers to begin preparing their students for the work place. Rather than encouraging a complete abandonment of what has been done before in composition instruction, my suggestions will interact with existing assignments to enhance student mastery of the skills necessary to write effectively in any medium.
I am particularly interested in the use of wikis to construct knowledge for the school as a whole. As I mentioned in class when I presented the poetry assignment I had created for use with a wiki, I would like to create an environment like a mini-Wikipedia on academic topics that all students could feed into, use, and revise collectively to share knowledge and to build upon what others have learned, rather than to retread the same information year after year as we seem to do now.
Working collaboratively is a difficult skill to teach, but the more practice students have in a low-stakes setting like a wiki in which content can quickly be revised, the more students (and faculty) will see how valuable collective knowledge can be to the academy. I hope to demonstrate with my research that not only is the inclusion of multimodal texts necessary and relatively simple to do, but that they teach skills that we currently are not able to give students and that are vital for a successful negotiation of career. These networking and collaboration skills can be developed most easily with digital tools. Furthermore, the product of the students' work will continue to influence future students at the school and students around the world who stumble upon the wiki.
