Theorizing WAC faculty development in multimodal project design

Abstract

This article addresses why and how to support faculty working with student writers on multimodal projects at all levels across the disciplines. The authors argue that faculty need support in the design, implementation, and assessment of multimodal projects so that students are better positioned to transfer writing knowledge and (multimodal) composing practices throughout and beyond their undergraduate careers. Building upon recent scholarship on transfer and multimodality, in concert with Anne Beaufort’s (2007) conception of knowledge domains from which successful writers draw, a framework is presented for implementing theory-driven WAC faculty development in multimodal assignment design. The authors conclude by summarizing faculty responses to engagement with these theories at a workshop session, describing multimodal assignments created by faculty, and sharing an assignment design guide that scaffolds the development of multimodal projects. [O]ne might ask: “I grant you that the text makes sound, but is it also sound in the sense of being purposeful, rigorously crafted, or soundly constructed?”...“Is the theory supporting this work really sound?” — Jody Shipka, “Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness” Adam Banks (2015), in his conference address as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, considered the necessity of retiring the essay—of the need “to promote the essay to dominant genre emeritus”—in favor of exploring changing literacies and their importance in multimodal and multigenre communication. While this is a laudable promotion—inspiring even— doing so within the context of a Writing Across the Curriculum program poses particular challenges when working with faculty who are entrenched in primarily alphabetic text-based disciplinary writing traditions and demand sound theorization to be convinced of good reasons to design and implement multimodal projects that diverge from the dominant genres of their fields. At Moravian College, faculty across disciplines teach writing within First-Year Writing Seminar (FYWS) and other general education and discipline-specific writing-enriched contexts as is common at small liberal arts colleges (Gladstein & Rossman-Regaignon, 2012). Because on average under 15% of FYWS sections at Moravian are taught by writing specialists, our goal for faculty development is to introduce writing studies praxes to the broader campus community so that faculty can bring this knowledge to both their FYWS and upper-division courses.1 We have found that framing faculty conversations about writing pedagogy around the connection between transfer of writing knowledge and abilities and the Theorizing WAC Faculty Development in Multimodal Project Design 43 ATD VOL17(1/2) building of metacognition around genre difference has been a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for helping faculty to understand and appreciate the need for students to engage with disciplinary knowledge in multiple genres, both as readers and writers. Faculty from across disciplines have been intrigued by the pedagogical possibilities afforded by positioning students as critical consumers and creators of multimodal texts, oftentimes for audiences beyond the classroom. In this article we share our theorization of the process of designing meaningful multimodal writing projects promoting our writing program’s transfer-centric mission to our colleagues across the arts, humanities, social science, natural science, and health science disciplines represented at our college. Promoting Transfer in a WAC Context Though the process of producing primarily alphabetic text in a specific genre can be an effective way to help students build proficiency with academic writing, critical thinking, and information literacy skills, the traditional research essay so often assigned in first-year writing is also (justifiably) criticized for being an inauthentic “mutt genre” (Wardle, 2009)—a product that is divorced from both the reading and writing that most people do in their personal and professional lives. When we—in our capacities of director of writing (Crystal) and writing center coordinator (Meg) at a small liberal arts college—began redesigning the writing program at Moravian College in 2016, we saw an opportunity to frame conversations about writing pedagogy and writing project design in ways that de-emphasized the mutt genres that many faculty (ourselves included) were assigning at the time. We instead focused on aligning the FYWS outcomes more closely with the “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (3.0)” (2014). This involved considering the ways that the new FYWS outcomes could articulate with discipline-relevant writing curricula (developed for writing-intensive courses and within Writing-Enriched Curriculum-opted academic units2) and promote projects that were tied to specific rhetorical exigencies and genres that could be generalizable by students as they iteratively developed a transfer-oriented “meta-awareness about writing, language, and rhetorical strategies” (Wardle, 2007, p. 82) in different disciplinary contexts. The larger goal of our revisions became the fostering of writing transfer, ultimately helping our students emerge from the college with greater rhetorical flexibility. These revisions ran parallel to and in some ways were supported by two institution-wide factors: 1) becoming an all-MacBook Pro and iPad campus in Fall 2014 whereby incoming undergraduates were given this technology (meaning that by Fall 2017 all full-time undergraduate students had the same tech to use in their classes) and 2) a Mellon Foundation grant to implement digital storytelling in humanities courses awarded in Fall 2014 and funded from Spring 2015 to Summer 2017.3 These changes incentivized faculty to assign digital, multimodal projects in courses across the disciplines; our own pedagogical practices led us both to implement podcast-inspired soundwriting projects in our FYWS courses. From programmatic assessment of the grant—specifically analysis of writing assignments from faculty who received course development stipends—we recognized that successful digital, multimodal projects share important characteristics, many of which revolve around the rhetorical situation defined by the project (or, in some cases, elements of the rhetorical situation that students were prompted to explicitly define for their own projects). This prompted us to create additional faculty development opportunities to support the design of thoughtful, rhetorically sound multimodal projects by presenting a modified version of Anne Beaufort’s (1999; 2007) knowledge domains heuristic. Fodrey & Mikovits 44 ATD VOL17(1/2) Theoretical Framework for Faculty Development on Multimodality “Successful writing transfer requires transforming or repurposing prior knowledge (even if only slightly) for a new context to adequately meet the expectations of new audiences and fulfill new purposes for writing.” — Jessie L. Moore, “Five Essential Principles about Writing Transfer” Potentially meaningful multimodal projects across the curriculum provide opportunities to use aural, gestural, spatial, visual, and alphabetic modes to make discipline-specific arguments for members of that discipline’s discourse community and to translate those arguments and related concepts for audiences representing discourse communities beyond the boundaries of a discipline, especially in disciplines that do not typically write outside of a small insular genre set (i.e., the most common genres used to communicate within a discourse community). However, as Lindsay Ann Sabatino and Brenta Blevins (2018), note about their approach to faculty development in multimodal composing, “[f]ew instructors have the preparation or experience to incorporate assignments and instruction using literacies in addition to the alphabetic” (p. 125). We concur, and also acknowledge that “all faculty in the university have important insights to contribute about how speaking and visual composing activities can enhance student learning” (Palmeri, 2012, p. 151). WAC directors therefore cannot assume faculty across the disciplines at our institutions—even those invested in the idea of doing multimodal projects—are prepared to create effective assessments or articulate these processes/goals to students. We have found this to be true in our local context as faculty beyond those who initially developed courses and assignments around the concept of digital storytelling with support of the Mellon Foundation grant enter into the conversation about multimodal composing in response to an institution-wide exigence for implementing multimodal composing practices. This exigence comes via student learning outcomes adopted in spring 2016 focusing on rhetorical flexibility in both FYWS and upper-division writing-intensive courses in the majors. The FYWS outcome asks students to “[i]mplement, and subsequently reflect upon, writing strategies and conventions suited to a variety of purposes, audiences, and context-appropriate genres and media,” while students in upper division writing-intensive courses are expected to “[p]roduce writing that reflects an awareness of context, purpose, audience, and genre conventions, particularly within the written genres (including genres that integrate writing with visuals, audio, or other multimodal components) of their major disciplines and/or career fields.” With writing knowledge transfer embedded in writing program outcomes and deemed essential to the program’s mission, we aim to position students as “writers [who] have the agency to both draw from and reshape writing knowledge to suit and influence writing context” (DePalma, 2015, p. 616). Therefore, faculty at our institution working with student writers at all levels across all disciplines necessarily need training on designing, implementing, and assessing multimodal projects so that students have a be