As a new graduate student at Northeastern University in the 2010s, I remember attending several professional development workshops on multimodal writing. Touted as a more accessible, creative, and enjoyable approach to teaching writing, the assignments that the speaker shared looked like shadowboxes filled with visual and textual content. I sat with other graduate students and lecturers who taught in the university’s writing program and could hear both the excitement and the fear in the voices of my colleagues as we turned to the Q and A portion of the discussion.
What happens if students do not know how to use technology to produce these multimodal texts?
How much time should I dedicate to teaching multimodal writing?
And, the one that I think summed it all up a bit more succinctly than other questions about access, engagement, and labor:
How am I supposed to evaluate these projects, I don’t know what to do with non-text content?
In writing programs, and writing centers, we have come a long way since the 2010s. With smart phones, tablets, and other kinds of portage technology, the barrier to engagement in creating media—video, audio, photography, collage, etc.—has lowered. These days, it is far less common, though not necessarily impossible, to find students at a media and design studio working on multimodal projects for first year writing. The ubiquity of technology has allowed us to teach multimodal writing with more ease than previously.
In writing centers, multimodality has been touted as an important element of tutoring work. Many scholars have studied multimodality in writing centers. Some scholars focus on the intersections of multimodal writing curricula and pedagogical interventions in writing center support (Moussu & Grant, 2020; Reid, 2021). Other scholars focus on the challenges and opportunities of writing centers shifting their programmatic focus to become multiliteracy centers (Archer, 2011; Lee & Carpenter, 2019; Cheatle, 2020).
In my own experience as a writing center director (I have worked at four different writing centers in vastly different higher education contexts), multimodality has been far less groundbreaking; it hasn’t revolutionized my writing centers; it hasn’t reshaped or reimagined the core function of what we do. It is, in many ways, seamless in its integration into the everyday work of my writing centers. Students come in with a variety of writing projects; they ask for and receive feedback; they often engage in writing/revision work and leave with some kind of writing plan to carry out on their own. In the end, though multimodality has slowly become more commonplace in different kinds of writing (and other) courses at the colleges and universities where I have worked, the impact that it has had on my writing centers has been nominal.
This is likely for two reasons: 1. I have not recreated or renamed my writing centers to be multiliteracy centers with a focus on multimodality and 2. Most of the work that students bring into the writing center remains text-based, even now in an age where multimodal composing projects are regularly assigned across the university.
Although multimodality and digital literacy was an exciting and new element of the work I was doing as an educator during graduate school, I wonder if the ways in which I have seen writing centers siloed also has an impact in whether a student chooses to bring non-text content into our centers. To this point, perhaps reimagining and changing one’s core mission could help with such an issue. But, then again, if students aren’t seeking feedback on digital and multimodal projects in large numbers, what would justify such a significant shift in a writing center’s scope and mission?
At one point, I used to assign a piece by McKinney (2009) on new media in my issues and methods in tutoring writing course. What I found, however, is that students distinguished little between different genres of text and found that working with writers required more in the way of tutoring pedagogy than specialized digital literacy or new media training. I am not sure if this is because tutors felt more comfortable moving between different media and genres or because, as digital natives, they were too ensconced in digital media to really distinguish it as a separate entity that requires unique pedagogical training. Or, perhaps they did not see the practical applications of spending precious in-class time on such a “niche”—to borrow from the youth—topic. I am not sure, but, eventually, like multimodality itself, it sort of got pushed to the background of training while other topics like feedback, inclusive pedagogy, and wellness came to the fore.
In the same way, I no longer work all that hard to situate multimodal composing. There was a time that I dedicated several classes to this topic in my first year writing courses. We would read the NCTE Statement on Multimodality Literacies (2005), we would read work from Virginia Kuhn. We would collect and examine examples of multimodal literacy and compositions. These days, we are surrounded by multimodal texts and while students might not be used to examining these texts, they are familiar with their rhetorical moves and their generic make-up. So, usually, we jump right in by drafting, composing, and revising multimodal projects.
This, I think, might be what we writing center practitioners can take away from the changes in how multimodality and our digital world have changed over the past twenty years. Perhaps we don’t need to rename our centers, rethink our pedagogy, reframe our mission. Then again, maybe we do. After all, as generative AI and other technologies encroach into the space traditionally occupied by writing centers, we need to think expansively and clearly about what we do. We also need to center humans in our work; this might mean clarifying the emotional support we provide, which AI cannot or it might mean rethinking what success in our spaces look like.
Ultimately, however we move forward, it feels good to remember those early days of my pedagogical training and seeing all the possibilities that multimodality provided to me and my writing centers. Centering the excitement and joy of expansive creation feels right in the work we do as writing educators.
References
Archer, A. 2011. Dealing with Multimodal Assignments in Writing Centres. The Writing Lab Newsletter.35, 9/10. 10 – 13. http://writinglabnewsletter.org
Cheatle, J. (2020). Multimodal Composition in Writing Centers: The Practical, the Problems, and the Potential. Journal of Southern Discourse, 24(1). 11-28.
Lee, S., & Carpenter, R. (2019). Startup Multiliteracy Centers and Faculty Collaboration on Multimodal Pedagogy. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 44(1-2), 11-19.
McKinney, J. G. (2009). New media matters: Tutoring in the late age of print. The Writing Center Journal, 29(2), 28-51.
Moussu, L., & Grant, C. (2020). A Collaborative Approach to Supporting L2 Students With Multimodal Work in the Composition Classroom and the Writing Center. Journal of Response to Writing, 6(2), 6.
NCTE (2005). Multimodal Literacies. https://ncte.org/statement/multimodalliteracies/
Reid, L. (2021). Cognitive load, multimodal composing and writing center support for multilingual writers. Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies, 7(1), 1223-1241.
