Our Story

In my classroom, the process—of exploring, writing, and creating—takes precedence. Though we work with goals and final versions in mind, I lean into the journey of learning and the many steps therein. A recovering perfectionist myself, I am acutely sensitive to my students’ oppressive standards of perfection for their academic, relational, and digital lives. From test scores to GPAs, relationship statuses to number of followers, filtered photos to witty captions, my students value the polished, popping final product, but my teaching emphasizes the necessary process it takes to get there. I believe learning (and living) of any kind is messy and chaotic, riddled with the imperfections that make us human, but we can become life-long learners when our classrooms are spaces wherein we feel liberated to be en route rather than finished, flawless products.  

 

Because to be human in this Information Age is to be necessarily multimodal, I seek to create a classroom wherein the learning process is likewise reflective of various modes of media: visual, aural, and alphabetical. Practically speaking, this looks like a student-generated online search of political campaign ads with subsequent spoken and written reflection of logical fallacies therein. Ira Shor’s criticism of “’spectatorism’” in the 1970s rings true for us today (Palmeri 138), and I too aim to cultivate within students a “critical consciousness” (139)—one that does more than rename their surroundings with alphabetical letters, but is also a “multimodal process of reseeing, rehearing, and refeeling the world as well” (139). My process-minded pedagogy looks like multimodal writing assignments that occur in slow, deliberate stages: personal memoirs that progress through freewritings, illustrations, photographs, multiple alphabetic drafts, and perhaps aural and visual presentations through Audacity, iMovie, Photoshop, or YouTube. I agree with the likes of Ann Berthoff, who argues that “the process of composing mental images—the process of visual thinking—is analogous to writing” and thus a highly formative stage in student composition (39). Additionally though, writing in my classroom is also aural, echoing the convictions of Ira Shor who calls teachers to “help students come to reimagine writing as a collaborative auditory process that depends as much on listening to peers as it does on listening to the self” (68). As such, a thesis statement in my class will evolve over 4-5 drafts via spoken conversation with peers, one-on-one conferences with me, or comment threads in Google docs. My rubrics measure a focused handful of attributes (thesis, logic, development, etc.) rather than every possible detail imaginable. Step into my classroom at any given point of the year, and you will see teacher and student alike en route, exploring the human experience, engaging as we do through multiple modes of media.

 

Students leave my course verbalizing a new-found “love for writing and an appreciation for the process.” They learn experientially the importance of all stages of composition, from prewriting to “revising more effectively.” And perhaps most notable of all, they grow to “embrace and become okay with [their] writing not being perfect.”

 

The reality of multiple intelligences and differentiated learning means that the process for each of us looks different, but multimodal media composition liberates each learner to feel comfortable and confident as writers en route—to and from wherever they choose.

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Works Cited:

Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print.