Prompt: What is/are the most significant thing/s that you learned which you plan to use in some way in the future?

Key Words

As someone who’s bad with names and dates (“Have I read so-and-so? I don’t know, maybe; what did they say?”), I really valued the way we emphasized the significance of composition scholars who have made major contributions to the field. I’d heard many of the names before in my classical rhetoric and professional writing courses as an undergraduate, but I felt disconnected from those individuals. I often remembered texts not on the value of the work or the prolificity of the scholar, but by playing memory games. I still think of Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book as some secret life of the late Robin Williams, actor. Somehow I struggle to retain information about Carolyn Miller and Peter Elbow, but if they’re distantly tied to the genie in Aladdin, they stay.

This semester, however, I’m starting to feel a connection to the community that I didn’t feel before. Don’t get me wrong – I still don’t feel like I’m on the inside, but I’m at least on the same island, probably hanging out around the barbed wire fence until I show that I’m worthy to be granted admittance. Names like “James Berlin” and “Richard Fulkerson” and “Ken Macrorie” aren’t abstract ideas but scholars with significant and individual contributions to Rhet/Comp. I now see a direct connection between terms like “Open Admissions” and “authentic voice” to the ways Composition has been reconsidered and reimagined. I know that the names “Mina Shaughnessy” and “Peter Elbow” and “Jacklynn Royster” are related to these terms (and I could actually tell you how!). I finished up the key words final today and – along with my excitement to use hashtags on a final – I was excited to rattle off key terms in Composition without the crutch of mnemonic devices. I intend to use this foundational knowledge to inform my future essays and class discussions, not only as a student but as a teacher next year. I don’t ever expect to have all the answers, but now I’m confident that I have some.

Theories for Multimodal Composing

Our discussions of post-process pedagogy heavily influenced the work I did this semester. My extended analysis was informed by research of Iowa State University’s ISUComm, a rebranded, multimodal approach to the teaching of First Year Writing. I was excited to see that not only are these assignments possible, but that they’re being done already. There are students who are learning about composing THIS SEMESTER as something more nuanced and significant than the traditional text compositions we were often taught as the foundation of Composition. My research for the final paper compounded this, and I began to consider what I’d already understood as true to be a legitimate approach to teaching writing: the most effective way to compose for a given audience is not always in the form of a written (text-only) argument. While I know my hands are a bit tied for the assignments my students will have to complete next year, I fully intend on bringing Youtube videos, images, memes, and all manner of rhetorical artifacts into the classroom so that my students understand composing from several angles and in several media. I want them to see other semiotic elements – audio, visual, oral, gestural – not as secondary to text, but as wholly foundational to theories of composing and rhetorical analysis.