The Word on Hope and Dread:

Multimodal Composition and Basic Writing

 

 

 

Digital readers encounter an inconceivable number of texts in a given week and sometimes even in one day. Online social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Digg, Delicious, and geotagging sites like Gowalla and FourSquare, compel public participation, rather than passive consumption. In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Henry Jenkins explains:

Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends. (8)

Participatory culture is, undoubtedly, an exciting emergence for those who teach the reading and writing skills that might be inherently valued in such a culture. But access to literacy, digital or traditional, is unequally distributed, as basic writing teachers well know, as is admittance to colleges and universities wherein those skills can be developed. The contemporary economic and social milieu is such that college-level education is now the minimum credential for the promise of economic wealth, though a degree is certainly no guarantee (see "Are Too Many Students Going to College?" from The Chronicle of Higher Education). Currently, more people attend college than ever before, even though the economic and career benefits might not always meet the expectations of college students or their families. For this reason, our commitment to basic writers must be more tenacious than ever. Susan Naomi Bernstein describes basic writers' frequent lack of significant “preparation for college-level courses based on systemic educational inequities in public schools,” “financial aid counseling,” “academic advising and personal counseling,” “disability services,” “and fine arts courses that foster and sustain students' growth in areas related to progress in basic writing.” In addition, basic writing students often experience an insufficient sense of belonging due to fear of inadequacy and the rejection of home literacies by mainstream measures of intellectual ability.“ For instance, as a young adult from a complex social class and family background, I felt undeserving and unprepared when I began college. To ease the inequity of class background and to build access to a "sense of belonging" for students who may be experiencing similar frustrations as they adjust to college, I try to enact a pedagogy that merges students' home literacies with those of the academy, while encouraging them to value, develop, and critique both sets of knowledge-making.

 

Truth be told, I could have used a basic writing class to help make obvious the politically constructed conventions of discourse in academic writing–rules that I wasn’t taught until I read Birkenstein and Graff’s They Say/I Say on my own in preparation for my first semester of teaching as a new graduate student. Graff and Birkenstein's "demystification" of academic writing as a scholarly conversation with particular, genre-based rules and expectations was liberating as I came to see that this form of writing was not just the elusive and latent talent of all people who are smart (which, then, would have excluded me). This was a real “ah ha!” moment for me, and the more I’ve read about, studied, taught and developed my own digital literacies, the more such moments I’ve had. Digital writing, too, is a series of rhetorical choices that people make in negotiation with the expecations of a partiucular audience. In other words, knowledge-making happens in the digital sphere just as well as, and often more rapidly than, it does in the historically print culture of the academy.

 

In a recent blog post, Alex Reid asks about the digital literacies of current incoming English graduate students who will be among the primary faculty for undergraduate students of 2035. These incoming graduate students, he argues, do not have the skills of the digital native, but rather cling to the academic foundations of print. Reid writes that “Digital media is a kind of bet. You can bet that it won't be important and ignore it. Or you can bet that it will and start studying it, start incorporating it into your discipline.” He argues that graduate faculty have a duty to the undergraduates of 2035 to prepare current graduate students to develop “high levels of digital literacy.” I 'd like to further that notion here and contend that we can also prepare our developmental and freshman writers to cultivate high levels of literacy in the arenas wherein so much knowledge-making now happens, the digital world. Reid asks a question that current college instructors should all consider: [C]an anyone today imagine that the future of the humanities will not require critical, interpretive, rhetorical, and compositional methods for digital media that are at least equal in sophistication to those we have built for print?” We owe our students direct and critical instruction in the literacies of the future, which are quickly becoming the literacies of today.

 

And yet, while many teachers are beginning to experiment with integrating digital literacies and multimodal texts into their courses in various forms, the field of basic writing hasn’t seen much scholarship attesting to what I see as the great dread and the great hope that can materialize in the teaching of digital literacies. As a new instructor, I considered the idea of teaching digital and multimodal literacies to be both enticing and frightening in equal parts. When I first started teaching, money was a very (very) finite resource for me; I wouldn’t have been able to provide anything my department didn’t already offer for students. Second, I worried that my students would be far more adept than I was. I also worried that they would know too little to be ready for an effective composition project. I was terrified that something would go wrong with the computers and I wouldn’t know how to fix it, that I would lose control, that the director of composition might disapprove of my methods and dispute my goals, that the students wouldn’t take it seriously or feel like they were doing real work, that the projects would seem silly and insignificant, that the products would suck, and that I would be called a fraud. Since then, I've been comforted, and also frustrated, by the fact that I am not alone. While most fellow teachers understand the rising import of digital literacies to both the work and social success of our students and ourselves, many freshman composition and basic writing classes are not yet embracing the digital sphere as an essential component of their curricula. From talking with colleagues at my own and other institutions, both formally and in professional development seminars, I’ve found that the fears I name above are major factors preventing all levels of writing teachers and students from experimenting with digital reading and writing projects.

 

I will describe my journey along the matrices of dread and hope by relating two teaching experiences with teaching digital composition to developmental writers. I'll provide examples of assignments that have proven to be successful for helping students develop print and digital literacies as well as academic and home literacies. In conjunction with these descriptions and accompanying resources useful to teachers, I will offer a rationale for and a critique of those assignments. My goal is to disarm my colleagues’ potential fears about digital work in the basic writing classroom with a framework for assignment design, while also offering a problematized view of the potential benefits for students and teachers. Ultimately, I argue that critical digital literacy–that is, the ability to learn, create, manipulate, read, critique, interpret, and deconstruct a variety of texts in various physical and virtual spaces at a given social, political, and economic moment–can facilitate an individual’s potency in our participatory culture, and hence, can expand access to the modes of mainstream knowledge-making, including the academic.

 

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