After reading the majority part of MC, I noticed that although it offers detailed guidelines in teaching multimodal composing, there are still some essential issues that I hope it can elaborate more on. Readings for this week remind me again those issues.
Alexander emphasizes repeatedly the importance of informing and reminding students the rhetorical criteria for multimodal assignments. As she summarizes in the peer feedback sheet on page 119, complicated criteria including “evidence of careful planning,” “value of the information,” “needs of audience,” “aesthetic coherence,” and “creativity” are key elements that students should look into while doing peer review. Thus came the question how can teachers define or breakdown those big concepts so that students and teachers will know what exactly to look for? How to draw the line between “successful” and “minimally successful”? Respectively speaking, what is evidence of careful work? What determines the “value” of the content? How can we stimulate students’ imagination to embrace a more concrete concept of audience? Is coherence the only thing that should be checked in terms of the aesthetics of the project? On what grounds can teachers judge the creativity of the project-makers without either losing their authority (for teachers who teach younger students) or demeaning students’ effort? Although I’m aware that the list of criteria is drawn sketchily for all types of multimodal composing, these specificities still need to be addressed as they are basically the “soul” of such curriculum—what teachers hope students can learn from doing the job. In a sense, it is the same question as what do students (report to) learn from multimodal composition? As instructors of writing and rhetoric, what should we use in teaching in order to bring students to more exercises of rhetorical representation and reflection rather than of putting up pictures, sound and videos?
I can’t quite answer all of those questions myself, but the need of purposefully designed multimodal assignments is evident, especially to undergraduate level writing courses. Instead of asking students to create some projects randomly, I think it will be much clearer and manageable if students were given certain target or goal of making a multimodal product. For example, in a recent issue of Computers and Composition, a graduate student reported a multimodal and multimedia writing course in Miami University, in which students were asked to make political video remix in response to the 2008 election season. The study argues that political video remix assignments can potentially
1) enable students to compose activist texts for wide public audiences, 2) heighten students’ understanding and application of key rhetorical concepts, 3) offer an opportunity for students and teachers to explore the delivery and circulation of digital texts, 4) highlight the important roles that parody and popular culture references can play in activist rhetoric, and 5) encourage students and teachers to question the conventional privileging of “originality” in composition classrooms. (77)
(For students' example, please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzPhhPD0D7w)
As the political and activist setting of the class encourages active learning of multimodal literacy as well as rhetorical concepts such as audience, it brings to attention the focus of multimodal writing class. From my point of view, it is important for undergraduate instructors to form the assignment not as practice of using different technologies and its evaluation correspondingly, but as rhetorical representation of certain argument via a variety of medium and modalities. As Dicke Selfe suggest, there are more to do to create an assignment without “pulling” technology in.
Works Cited
Dubisar, Abby and Jason Palmeri. “Palin/Pathos/Peter Griffin: Political Video Remix and Composition Pedagogy.” CC 27 (2010): 77-93.
I agree...these are vexing questions. How does one evaluate "aesthetic coherence" and "creativity" in a multimodal project, and how do we guide students in making their own judgments on these issues? These are issues with alphabetic texts as well, no doubt, but again, the sheer inexperience most of us have with non-alphabetic rhetoric makes these projects troubling.
ReplyDeleteYou raise some important questions. Of course, when evaluating student work, many of us have a different approach and value different aspects of student writing, although all of us, I should think, know a good paper when we see it. Multimodal projects, however, seem more difficult, probably because of our inexperience in assigning them and even inexpereince in doing them. Since we have all written many papers throughout our academic careers, we have a better knowledge of how to evaluate papers. Things like "evidence of careful work" sound very difficult to judge, especially when thinking of it generally, without specific examples. Perhaps some specific examples of such evaluation would be helpful for us in recognizing how to judge multimodal compositions, but at the same time, what we might really need is to discover that for ourselves in both doing and assigning such projects.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you SiYang. I think it's difficult enough to assess alphabetic assignments, to really understand what the student was trying to enunciate or accomplish. Unless restricted as in the example your provide, multimodal assignments seem like they could be extremely difficult to interpret and assess.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, loved the video!(Just in case anyone is surprised that I would? :-).It is interesting to consider how Palin both won the republican base for McCain while simultaneously loosing the general election, especially through the eyes of feminism, rhetoric and political science. But I can talk about that off-line with anyone who is interested.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of evaluation on page 119. I think the "peer" part of the feedback form is where it can succeed without a super-standardized criteria, or visible thresholds between 1 and 2 or 3 and 5. The law of averages is on our side if we involve the whole class in this review process. If the majority think that a piece of multimodal composition is successful, then it likely was. We, as the more experienced and/or educated, have our own judgments to make, but in conjunction with the class. Maybe try it out and deal with problems as the arise?
Returning to the video, 213 people "like" it, and 47 others "dislike" it. It has also been viewed 87,496 times--in terms of like and dislike, this is a success rate ratio of about 4.5:1. Could incorporate this as a quantitative measure in addition to our qualitative measure provided in the book?
Thanks, guys.I agree that more engagement and experiences will be able to provide us with concrete sense of evaluation. And @ Bryan, I like the rate ratio of the video that you point out. I haven't thought of the project in this way. We can talk more about that if you are interested in it, and if we met somewhere in Ellis.
ReplyDelete