Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

Description

A student’s avatar navigates a virtual world and communicates the desires, emotions, and fears of its creator. Yet, how can her writing instructor interpret this form of meaningmaking? Today, multiple modes of communication and information technology are challenging pedagogies in composition and across the disciplines. Writing instructors grapple with incorporating new forms into their curriculums and relating them to established literary practices. Administrators confront the application of new technologies to the restructuring of courses and the classroom itself. Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres examines the possibilities, challenges, and realities of mutimodal composition as an effective means of communication. The chapters view the ways that writing instructors and their students are exploring the spaces where communication occurs, while also asking “what else is possible.” The genres of film, audio, photography, graphics, speeches, storyboards, PowerPoint presentations, virtual environments, written works, and others are investigated to discern both their capabilities and limitations. The contributors highlight the responsibility of instructors to guide students in the consideration of their audience and ethical responsibility, while also maintaining the ability to “speak well.” Additionally, they focus on the need for programmatic changes and a shift in institutional philosophy to close a possible “digital divide” and remain relevant in digital and global economies.     Embracing and advancing multimodal communication is essential to both higher education and students. The contributors therefore call for the examination of how writing programs, faculty, and administrators are responding to change, and how the many purposes writing serves can effectively converge within composition curricula. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: "What Else is Possible": Multimodal Composing and Genre in the Teaching of Writing Part 1. Multimodal Pedagogies That Inspire Hybrid Genres Chapter 1. Genre and Transfer in a Multimodal Composition Class Chapter 2. Back to the Future? The Pedagogical Promise of the (Multimedia) Essay Chapter 3. Including, but Not Limited to, the Digital: Composing Multimodal Texts Chapter 4. Something Old, Something New: Integrating Presentation Software into the “Writing” Course Chapter 5. Thinking outside the Text Box: 3-D Interactive, Multimodal Literacy in a College Writing Class Part II. Multimodal Literacies and Pedagogical Choices Chapter 6. Invention, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom: The Storyboard as Exemplary Genre Chapter 7. Multimodal Composing, Appropriation, Remediation, and Reflection: Writing, Literature, Media Chapter 8. Writing, Visualizing, and Research Reports Chapter 9. Multimodality, Memory, and Evidence: How the Treasure House of Rhetoric Is Being Digitally Renovated Part III. The Changing Structure of Composition Programs Chapter 10. Student Mastery in Metamodal Learning Environments: Moving beyond Multimodal Literacy Chapter 11. Multivalent Composition and the Reinvention of Expertise Chapter 12. Going Multimodal: Programmatic, Curricular, and Classroom Change Chapter 13. Rhetoric across Modes, Rhetoric across Campus Faculty and Students Building a Multimodal Curriculum Contributors Index