Tuesday, May 27, 2008
From Analyzing to Composing
Sheridan tells us that the 20th century asked us to be "consumers of multimodal compositions," while the 21st century is asking us to be "composers of multimodal texts" (342). This new mode (ha, pun intended) of thinking is difficult to adjust to at times, at least for me. I was just getting used to the idea that composition class meant analyzing more than text: it meant analyzing web sites, film, music, speech, photography, graphics, typefaces, and even cultural artifacts. Fortunately I haven't been in the field long enough to have developed any stubborn mindsets; however, my ranking of comfort level with multimodal texts is 1. analyze, 2. compose, 3. teach. Multimodal texts do seem to take teaching and tutoring to a more complicated plane, and I wonder if more collaborative efforts are called for here.
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I certainly called upon collaborative teaching when I opened up to allowing a multimodal project using a wiki. I called on the librarian and the director of technical support to help my students with their projects. Collaborative teaching is a must because I just don't know it all and suspect that I never will. Something new is always being introduced. My learning curve is almost always vertical.
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