Multimodal Composition

Faculty Development Programs and Institutional Change

Shyam B. Pandey, Santosh Khadka, Shyam B. Pandey, Santosh Khadka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367756208
• eBook ISBN: 9781000437263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection explores the role of individual faculty initiatives and institutional faculty development programs in supporting programmatic adoption of multimodal composition across diverse institutional contexts.

The volume speaks to the growing interest in multimodal composition in university classrooms as the digital media and technology landscape has evolved to showcase the power and value of employing multiple modes in educational contexts. Drawing on case studies from a range of institutions, the book is divided into four parts, each addressing the needs of different stakeholders, including scholars, instructors, department chairs, curriculum designers, administrators, and program directors: faculty initiatives; curricular design and pedagogies; faculty development programs; and writing across disciplines. Taken together, the 16 chapters make the case for an integrated approach bringing together insights from unique faculty initiatives with institutional faculty development programs in order to effectively execute, support, and expand programmatic adoption of multimodal composition.

This book will be of interest to scholars in multimodal composition, rhetoric, communication studies, education technology, media studies, and instructional design, as well as administrators supporting program design and faculty development.

Part I

Faculty Initiatives

1 How to Multimodal

An Institutional–Infrastructural Exploration

Christina Boyles, Andy Boyles Petersen, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163220-1

Introduction

Students in a sophomore-level course on Historical Methods jointly offered by Jewish Studies and the Department of History have the option, for their final project, of creating a museum exhibit (with a seven-to-nine-page paper explaining the exhibit) or composing a web site (with a seven-to-nine-page paper situating the website). The syllabus indicates that “the paper should address the subject of the United States and the Holocaust in some way,” and promises that shorter assignments throughout the semester will help students build to their final project, a component of which is a prospectus and annotated bibliography.

Students in a junior-level Mechanical Engineering course read and interpret figures, and produce equations and explanations as part of their weekly homework (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 An exam sheet from a fluid dynamics course.

Students in a New Media Drivers License® cross-listed senior- and graduate-level course create professional accounts and profiles across spaces (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter); produce blog posts about effective blog posts; create Search Engine Optimization (SEO) principles; and generate social media marketing strategy that includes practices and examples of effective copy/text, images, photographs, and video content.

Students who participate in the university’s annual undergraduate research forum present their work in a range of modalities, including oral presentations supplemented by a slideshow presentation, poster presentations crafted with research poster expectations in mind, and performances of music and dance. Often, students prepare handouts that include their name, presentation title, and abstract, along with other elements difficult to convey via slideshow presentation or poster (e.g., citations).

Indeed, outside of rhetoric and writing studies—and, we would argue the letters-based humanities generally (with the exception of Digital Humanities or DH, which does engage in multimodal research processes and techniques, yet the majority of DH scholarship is still primarily alphabetic and mono-modal)—multimodal composing is often the norm and a relatively unexplored commonplace. In finance, our colleagues produce spreadsheets. In business, students produce a range of charts and graphics. In mechanical engineering, schematics and equations are the norm. In advertising, sketches and draft copy are created. In marketing, students develop campaign plans, including demographic displays and sales-distribution maps. Work in human biology includes images that range from scatter plot charts to detailed medical renderings.

Indeed, in our hallways and beyond, the world is richly multimodal. Students consume textbooks that include photographic and graphic content along with alphabetic text. They engage supplemental materials via websites and apps; their courses are supported through course-management systems that include robust visual–alphabetic interfaces and that allow for sharing audio, video, and other content. In the particular COVID-19 context of our drafting of this chapter, the majority of our institutional communications are digital and multimodal.

Consider, for instance, the created digitally and rendered physically graphic shown in Figure 1.2, one of the university-produced graphics designed to be printed as an 8-inch by 8-inch sticker to affix to floors to maintain physical distancing. The graphic includes multiple colors: light green, our university branded dark green (PMS: 567; CMYK: C:82 M:0 Y:69 K:59; web: 18453B), and white. The graphic includes some text and two fonts, one of which is our university-branded font face, Gotham, the other a complementary script font face. It also includes one key image: An illustration of our university mascot, Sparty, wearing a mask. The final graphic content is the seemingly hand-drawn set of non-symmetrical dots in the background.

Figure 1.2 University-branded floor decal.

Also consider a recent update by the university president, shared to university stakeholders (faculty, students, staff) via email and also available on the president’s website (Figure 1.3). The email includes a header graphic with the university Spartan helmet, along with the “MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY” text treatment and “OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT,” both appearing in our university-branded Gotham font face. The letter uses bold face and larger text for headings to separate content in the letter and to visually signal a shift in focus. The letter also includes a graphic representation of the president’s handwritten signature.

Figure 1.3 Excerpt from an email from the university president.

These are but two institutional examples of the types of multimodal compositions that surround (and frame, and provide signage for, and decorate, and more) our institutional lives. So why is it that the humanities, and specifically both English Studies and Rhetoric and Writing Studies, continue to interrogate the role, function, value, and indeed the very definition of “multimodal compositions?” It has been 25 years since the New London Group called for a pedagogy of multiliteracies, a call taken up robustly in a range of scholarship across writing and rhetoric studies. And yet, the questions and arguments heard both in our hallways and at our conferences remain: “But visuals aren’t the domain of writing studies,” “But I’m not trained to teach communication beyond the written word,” “Isn’t this the job of [art/graphic design/communications]?” Although some elements of page layout or information visualization find their way into our upper-level Professional Writing and Technical Communication classes, the relationship between writing classes and multimodality remains variable at best (in a separate chapter, “Graduate Student and Faculty Development in Multimodal Composition,” we focus on multimodal teacher training in the context of first-year writing). Although multimodal composition has, to some extent, become more commonplace in rhetoric and writing studies, and in some writing programs and in first-year writing classes specifically, the institutional structures to support such work are undertheorized and not often enough a topic of scholarly conversation.

In this chapter, we explore the when, the how, and, especially, the what of multimodal-related and multimodal-implicated infrastructure. Specifically, we:

• Describe and situate infrastructure as a key term and focus for institutional exploration
• Share our experiences in institutional–infrastructural work
• Describe implications of an institutional–infrastructural analysis on multimodal composing in ways applicable to other institution sizes and types, and other ranges of faculty work
• Suggest implications and directions for future institutional–infrastructural research

Situating Infrastructure

To situate infrastructure, we’re primarily drawing from two historical pieces, both published in 2005: “Why Teach Digital Writing?” published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy by the WIDE Research Center Collective, and “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing,” published in College Composition and Communication. Why draw from pieces 15 years old to conceptualize infrastructure for contemporary multimodal composing? We do so because, first, both of these pieces are based on and report from our current institutional context (Michigan State University), and both of these pieces situate infrastructure in a way that transcends specific technology, tools, places, or spaces. That is, even though the technology of today is much, much different than that of 15 years ago, the ways in which writing with technology is conceptualized in the two pieces are still relevant for our discussion and analysis today.

In “Why Teach Digital Writing?” the authors aim to address the multiple questions posed to writing instructors—questions that echo the questions we shared above (e.g., “But I’m not trained to teach communication beyond the written word”) by providing readers with potential responses to the question “Why teach digital writing?” The authors situate the piece as somewhat of a guide, providing both scholarly arguments to defend the importance of teaching digital writing and policy and curricular documents to support such teaching. The authors situate digital writing as such:

we refer to a changed writing environment—that is, to writing produced on the computer and distributed via the Internet and World Wide Web … the dramatic change is the networked computer connected to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Connectivity allows writers to access and participate more seamlessly and instantaneously within web spaces and to distribute writing to large and widely dispersed audiences.

Specific to our focus in this chapter, we would borrow from “Why Teach Digital Writing?” to extend this “changed writing environment” to writing spaces of 2021. These are spaces where writing is more expansively situated to include graphic elements (icons, glyphs, symbols), data displays (tables, charts, infographics), photographic content, video content, and more. Typographic expression has, further, expanded and should be considered part of our multimodal toolkit—not just words on the page, but the design and multimodality of words on the page (different fonts, different formatting features).

Admittedly, none of this is “new.” But what is new is, first, what the authors above articulate: Connectivity. Second, what is also new are the multimodal means available to users. In 2005, we were on the cusp of the production-oriented “Web 2.0.” Proprietary software (that is, software only for use on a Mac or PC) was still the norm. Multimodal composing tools were actually primarily monomodal (e.g., image-editing applications for working with photographs; video-production software for working with video) and still clunky, expensive, and primarily used by highly trained professionals. Today, however, those tools are theoretically much more commonplace and accessible—a significant composing shift that hasn’t been taken up in much rhetoric and composition (“rhet/comp”) scholarship.

In “Infrastructure and Composing,” the authors share a multimodal piece (a series of drawings, animated and turned into a video with voiceover narration sharing the story of a student’s part-time job—and her departure from it) and the processes, decisions, affordances, and complexities under the piece. The authors of the piece turn from the what of new media composing to the when, drawing from the work of Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder on infrastructure. Star and Ruhleder, in an information systems context, describe infrastructure in terms of its embeddedness, transparency, reach or scope, links with conventions of practice, embodiments of standards, and the ways in which infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks down. The authors adopt this lens to describe different variables that influence the student’s composing context (e.g., computer networks, network configurations, operating systems and software, decision-making processes about who has access to what equipment).

Both of these pieces provide a fruitful, historical, technological, and rhetorical context for the ways in which we approach infrastructure in this chapter.

Our Experiences with/in Infrastructural Work

Dispersion and DH

At our institution—and we suspect many others of similar size—Digital Humanities is dispersed across a number of labs and centers. These include but are not limited to Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences; LEADR: The Lab of the Education and Advancement in Digital Research located in History and Anthropology; the Digital Scholarship Lab located in our main library; DH@MSU located in the College of Arts & Letters; and the now-closed Creativity Exploratory (which we discuss below). We would also suggest that our Writing Center, with its Multimodal Writing Center affiliates and satellites, functions to support little-d, little-h digital humanities work—work that, today, most of us in rhetoric and composition studies are doing, whether we consider it such or not, and whether we attend to the related modalities and infrastructure such work requires. Although all of the DH entities share a broad mission—to support digital humanities scholarship and/or pedagogy at Michigan State University (MSU)—their location in disparate disciplinary homes results in varied access to infrastructure, including funding, technologies, labor, and resources. This, in turn, leads to each unit specializing in different types of multimodal projects spanning cultural heritage exhibits, pitch videos, 3D prints, and data visualizations. Sometimes these projects live within and are engaged at just one of the spaces listed above; other times, the projects span disciplines, departments, and spaces.

Partnerships between MSU’s digital humanities labs, centers, and spaces are complicated infrastructurally. They live in different departmental and college contexts, and in different institutional spaces and places (e.g., the main library, which has its own Dean of University Libraries and which is overseen by the office of the Associate Provost for Academic Services, Enrollment Management and Academic Initiatives). Each space has a home/operational unit, and each has its own budget. Some have staff, others do not. Some have graduate student assistantship appointment lines allocated to them, others do not. Some have staff lines available to them; others have faculty tenure-home appointments related to them. Others do not.

To focus specifically on student experiences with digital humanities, the DH curriculum is similarly dispersed and cross-unit. Undergraduate students who pursue the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Multimodal Composition: From Faculty Development Programs to Institutional Change
• PART I Faculty Initiatives
• PART II Curricular Design and Pedagogies
• PART III Faculty Development Programs
• PART IV Writing across the Disciplines
• Index