In Autumn Quarter 2020, MAWRD students will have the opportunity to take WRD 533: Writing Across Media. Taught by Jason Kalin, the class will meet on Wednesday evenings from 6:00-9:15 pm. With Autumn Quarter enrollment beginning on April 30, Jason gave us an in-depth overview of what students can expect from the course. From weekly compositions to thought-provoking readings, WRD 533 is a hands-on course that promises an engaging learning experience with a focus on multimodality, materiality, and how we make meaning through them.
WRD 533 is described as a “writing-, analysis-, and production-intensive” course. What does this mean in the classroom and why do you take this approach in teaching this class?
A writing-, analysis, and productive intensive course attempts to bring together theory and practice through thinking-by-doing and learning-by-doing. We will read about issues related to multimedia and multimodal composing, critically analyze examples of such compositions, and try to make our own. In this way, we will work to understand how multimedia and multimodality influence our writing processes and how we construct meaning, as writers and readers, through the materials and materiality of composing.
A writing-, analysis-, and production-intensive approach also provides opportunities for practice and feedback from both peers and me – a process of reflecting on, critiquing, and re-envisioning our multimedia and multimodal compositions.
What types of projects will students complete for this class? How might these compositions engage multiple media?
Nearly every week students will be tasked with a “composing experiment” that will ask them to respond to the readings both critically and creatively – applying the readings and composing with new media and modes. These composing experiments encourage students to practice with different writing technologies and multiple modes, thus shaping why, how, and what they compose.
For example, one week, students might be prompted: “Use the 3in. x 5in. index card, the 8.5in. x 11in. paper, and two sheets of newsprint to respond critically and creatively (an explanation and an experiment) to the readings.”Another week, I might ask students: “Go to a specific place, and record audio of that place. Include at least three sound sources in your recordings. Compose a 1–2 minute soundscape of that place by layering the sound recordings. What do you want your listeners to hear and to experience of that place?”
Students will also have opportunities to create their own “composing experiments” for the class to explore. Together, these tasks allow students to begin assembling the major project. Although I have not decided on parameters for the major project, students will have options and will have much critical and creative control of the project. The project will ask students to compose with multiple media and modes while also engaging with various purposes, audiences, genres, and contexts.
What are some of the key “readings” for the course, and what topics or theories do they cover?
Throughout the course, we will think about the difference among medium, media, modes, materials, materiality, multimedia, and multimodality.
We may begin the course with selected readings from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologies of the Word to help us understand how writing, as one medium, alters and shapes our experience of ourselves and our realities. Writing, Ong argues, restructures consciousness by changing how and what we are capable of thinking. Another famous example of how writing and writing technologies shape consciousness is Friedrich Nietzsche’s experience with typewriters – to paraphrase, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”
We will read articles by Anne Wysocki’s, including “awaywithwords: On the Possibilities in Unavailable Designs,” and Claire Lauer’s “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and “Multimedia” in the Academic and Public Spheres.” We will also be thinking about the process of multimodal composing, as examined in “On Multimodal Composing.” We will read and be inspired by the scholarship of Jody Shipka (Toward a Composition Made Whole) and Steph Ceraso (Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening).
Throughout the course, we will return to the following “essential questions:”
- What is writing? What is writing across media? What is multimodal composing?
- How do writing technologies affect/effect thinking and meaning?
- How are we to understand multimodality as rhetorical? How does design function rhetorically, persuading an audience through multimodal dimensions?
- How do writers create meaning through mediated experiences? How do audiences create meaning through mediated experiences?
- Why and how do multimodal compositions circulate in technological culture?
After completing WRD 533, what knowledge, skills, or attitudes do you hope students will have?
After completing WRD 533, students should be able to think critically and rhetorically about writing across media. Specifically, students should be able to analyze how media possess unique affordances and constraints that influence, shape, and limit what can be done in that media. Written words, for example, are only one expressive media among many others, including images and sound, that contribute to rhetorical practices and meanings. More broadly, students should come to understand that we not only express ourselves through media but also experience ourselves and our lives through media. At the same, students should work through the course having practiced composing with multimedia and multimodality and to transfer what they have learned to their academic and professional goals.