Hello Everyone,
I am Sharanya Sridhar, a first year PhD student in literature. I also teach College Writing. During my masters program at Boise State, I taught first-year writing with a different curriculum that introduced me to critical conversations about multimodal composition. The opportunity be a Tech Fellow this spring allowed me to talk about my evolving ideas about multimodality with my peers. It’s been incredibly helpful to have a community of first-year teachers with whom I could ruminate my excitements as well as anxieties about using technology and pedagogical practices. What follows is a snapshot of my project for Tech Fellows and a related activity. Hope you enjoy it!
Overarching context: My project for Tech-fellows this spring involved thinking about ways to incorporate multimodality and digital rhetoric in classroom conversations. I have also been thinking about ways to frame interesting theoretical concepts from composition studies as classroom activities so it becomes accessible and useful for first-year writers. The following activity speaks to both these goals.
Immediate Goal(s): To introduce students to certain threshold concepts in writing, to get them to think about different shades of meaning the term ‘text’ could take, to understand that writing is always multimodal.
Preparatory Reading Assignment: As a preparation for this activity, students read 5 threshold concepts (I picked out the ones I wanted them to read) from “Writing is a Rhetorical and Social Activity”, Naming What We Know and pick 2 favourite concepts
In Class Activity: Based on the concepts they picked as their favourite, I put them in 4 different groups. Each group had to visually represent the concept they picked. Some made mind maps or roadmaps while some represented their concept with a series of sketches. Each group presented their visual representation and explained the concept but also talked about their own choices in representing their chosen concept.
Follow up Discussion: We talked about how we use different mediums to write, to make meaning, and to communicate our thoughts. We also talked about how writing gets interpreted differently based on how readers interpret it and the mediums readers use to interpret a piece of writing.
Follow up freewrite: Based on the activity and our discussion, I asked them to write about their definition of text and it might be different from their previous conceptions of the term. I also asked them to give examples of certain texts that they hadn’t thought of as texts before.
Their responses to the activity and the freewrite was a positive one. It helped me set the the tone for the second unit (Interacting with a Text) and allowed them to explore multimodal texts like Ted Talks for their unit essay.