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.
I'm trying to understand your exact focus. Is it to promote using a wiki classroom/school-wide for students to reflect on their experience with multimodal texts? Or are they to use the wiki as a vehicle for collaborating on the actual production of multimodal texts?
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm seeing two different strands here. 1) Advocating for teaching multimodal texts in the high school classroom. 2) Advocating for using a wiki in the high school classroom.
I'm assuming #2 somehow factors in to or is related to #1 in some way?
Also, you may find this germane: http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/reviews/kirchoff/wikiwritingreview.html
I apologize for not being clear. I meant for the wiki to serve as an example of how multimodal texts are effective.
ReplyDeleteHey Laura,
ReplyDeleteSounds interesting. I think the most important aspect of this research is that it has practical value. Too many times students do not see the practicability of what they are doing and it turns them off. Anyway, good luck. Cant wait to hear about what you come up with.
Hey there, Miss Laura- How's it going?
ReplyDeleteAs usual...I'm straying from the beaten path, but as I read some of your proposal it occurred to me not only why older gen's are, at least partially, the way they are when it comes to collaboration, but it also made me wonder why this is something that we've never mentioned in the class...the answer to the last question is probably that it's not that important in light of the other things that we are looking at.
But, one of my not fully developed or presently expounded on theories as to why collaboration is a newer generation 'thing' and seems so foreign even to the forties set is the idea of self-acclimation.
Dr. M has actually has touched upon it, in retrospect, but I have to tell you that my gen was brutally competitive and so was my daughter's and she's a lot younger...so I guess my point is (sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland-chasing bunnies)that these are relatively new concepts, that you are suggesting, and the field for research is very open to discovery and breakthrough.
It is exciting for those who like research and a challenge. And, I think we all know you do!-Best of Luck!-A.
Laura,
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it would be possible for you to create a Wiki that faculty could use to create, develop, and share knowledge on a given topic, such as some kind of professional development. Though there may be scrapes, this could show them the benefits of using this kind of technology in the classroom. For instance, you might see if some teachers in your department could contribute to a wiki about assignments that teach rhetorical analysis or ways to integrate grammar exercises.
Miranda