Teaching: Quick View

All items in the table of contents below link to descriptions of the teaching materials within my portfolio. The selected artifacts, at bottom, either link to those items as they are referenced in the portfolio or to outside resources (in the case of student projects that are still live on the Web).

selected artifacts
As with the above teaching development plan, which outlines in article-form the changes I have made and expected to make in my primary course (multimodal composition) from 2004 until 2008, the artifacts below are selected to represent the breadth of “writing” that surrounds my continued development of this course since 2008. I call Multimodal Composition my “primary” course because it is the only course that I have taught for more than one semester with a similar syllabus. Since 2004, when I began my first tenure-track position, I have taught 22 classes (as of Fall 2009), of which 19 have been new preps. As all of the artifacts in my portfolio implicitly suggest, my academic goal (due in part to the number of preps I have had) is to sanely, seemlessly bridge my research about digital scholarship, my teaching students (both graduate and undergraduate) to compose and analyze digital scholarship, and my service work that forwards the recognition of digital scholarship at the national level. The artifacts below represent a snapshot of this bridge. A short description of each artifact is included.

English 239: Multimodal Composition syllabus [external link]
This syllabus (Fall 2008) represents the first time I brought my editorial and research work directly into the undergraduate classroom, asking students to study the history of multimodal composition in English Studies, attend a national conference on the topic (see CTLT grant below), and create a series of digital media texts as their final projects that they would submit to the edited collection coming out of the conference (see chapter proposal below).

CTLT/Teaching-Learning Development Grant [internal link]
To get funding to take the 12 undergraduates from the class above to Louisville for the national conference on multimodal composition, I wrote an internal grant with the students. This grant is one of the first that connects my teaching and research agendas using internal or external funding sources.

undergraduate chapter proposal [pdf]
As a written component for the Fall 2008 Multimodal Composition class, the students and I wrote a proposal to submit their final projects to the conference’s digital-media collection,  The New Work of Composing. The students wrote three drafts of their individual proposals, and I compiled them and wrote the introduction. The proposal was accepted (with some modifications).

digital scholarship project [external link]
After teaching the Fall 2008 Multimodal Class, I taught the course again in Spring 2009, but obviously needed a new major project since the national conference and submission deadline for the digital book collection had passed. Instead, in another serendipitous moment (like the conference), two colleagues from other universities proposed to do a special issue of Kairos on undergraduate digital media research. I used that as the major project for undergraduates in that class, but I had two graduate students also taking the class, so they were required to come up with project ideas that they could also submit (if they wanted) to Kairos. PhD student, Jason Docktor, created a digital media piece, “Documenting My Multimodal Creation,” which includes a video he might assign his first-year writing students to compose and documents his process of creating that sample video. (He’d never made a video before.) His webtext, which uses a blog platform, serves two purposes: (1) It shows his students some of the processes of researching and composing the assignment he had in mind (an ethnographic video), and (2) It provides a meta-analysis of the process and assignment, which would be of interest to other teachers who want to implement similar projects in their writing classes for the first time. Docktor submitted this piece to the Praxis section of Kairos (which is headed up by section editors, not myself).

undergraduate portfolio reflection [external link]
In the same class as above (English 239, Spring 09), undergraduate student Andrew Wasowicz created a 3D animation for his portfolio/class reflection. Wasowicz said he’d never used the animation program before (something he found online), but learned it on his own, came up with a structure for the reflection that would maintain a reader’s interest over the 4-minute text, published it on YouTube, and embedded it his portfolio (a WordPress blog) for my class. What I appreciate most about this reflection is the detailed examples he gives about in-class assignments and exercises that showcase the course goals and his learning outcomes (which is what I asked them to do; he did it really well, exemplifying my goals of wowing me and each other, learning to learn new writing technologies, using multiple media in sophisticated ways, etc.).

undergraduate research fellowship [internal link]
As a follow-up to the Fall 2008 Multimodal Composition course, in which undergraduate student Matthew Wendling showed expertise in digital media technologies and took to the theory quite well, I asked him to work as a research assistant for me and to revise his group’s and the other two undergraduate groups’ webtexts for their accepted chapter to the digital book collection, The New Work of Composing. To fund Wendling’s work over the summer of 2009, I wrote a fellowship proposal based on a call from ISU’s Research and Sponsored Programs office. Wendling significantly revised the chapter pieces for me to pull together into a whole. He also kept a blog about his revision processes, as data for a future co-authored research project.

(Note: I don’t know who is responsible, but I take anecdotal credit for ISU’s recent interest in funding undergraduate research. Before I applied for the CTLT grant, above, I called every office on campus—Dean of Students, Research and Sponsored Programs, Graduate School, Cross Chair of SoTL—that I thought might fund undergraduate research, which the students were doing by going to the Watson conference for the Fall 2008 Multimodal Composition course. At that time, no one (other than the Honors Program for honors students) was funding undergraduate research as such. That situation seemed to change quickly, as I received an email from the Graduate School that they were (by the middle of Fall 2008 semester) offering small grants to undergraduate students in exchange for presenting at the spring research symposium. Then, in the spring term, RSP sent out this call for undergraduate research. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I like to think my pointing out to several of these offices that no one was funding undergraduate research made a difference.)

NEH Teaching Development Fellowship [internal link]
Even though I had been very satisfied with my change of English 239′s major project of creating and submitting digital scholarship since Fall 2008 (in part because it was the first course syllabus that I’ve been able to teach for more than one semester, and thus tweak slightly over the last three semesters), I attended a 2009 NEH Summer Institute at the University of Southern California, which helped me consider how I might make that syllabus and the learning outcomes more sustainable for myself and students. By more sustainable, I mean that I wanted to teach 239 in a way that students could jump more quickly into the technological aspects while gaining more of the theoretical aspects. I also wanted a way that would help students transfer their knowledge about multimodal composition (both theoretically and practically) to other classes, projects, and their work life. Without a pre-req (which I don’t want on that class because I like it’s gen-ed-like qualities of ‘multimodal composition for everyone’), however, that kind of knowledge-building can’t happen in one semester. At USC, I worked with database designers who have built some templates for digital media scholarship, so I proposed to this new NEH teaching grant to build some additional templates for use in this undergraduate class. The grant was submitted October 1, 2009, and I should hear of its status some time in March or April of 2010. I’ve included this grant as a teaching artifact because it shows how I plan to continue developing my teaching, and even though the grant doesn’t say it explicitly (due to its criteria that limits the grant to undergraduate teaching), I plan on using the templates in graduate courses where such technological sustainability is even more important (because of the need to focus on theory instead) as well as in my editorial work with Kairos.

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another challenge: Over the last year, through digital media projects I have participated in as well as in my teaching (and choosing of artifacts), I have noticed a bias in how genders are represented. All of the graduate students who have taken my English 239 class as independent studies (in absence of a graduate-level course on multimodal theory) have been male, despite my personal requests to female graduate students. All of the student examples (including undergraduates) that I point to above are male. This lop-sided representation is odd given that my research in faculty publication of digital media scholarship shows that it has been primarily authored by female scholars. Without having done further research (although this issue is now on my radar for future research), my guess is that in the rhetorical situation of a portfolio or digital media text that needs to speak for itself, male students create more linear-logical digital texts while females create texts that bend genres in ways that might require more explanation (I call this the transgendered representation of digital media scholarship). I don’t know if it’s still a generational issue with males being more familiar with digital technology than female students (despite that several Pew surveys report that teen females have overtaken teen males in online communication, including composing with multiple media; perhaps this issue will change as some of those teens are just now entering my classrooms). This is not the same issue as the so-called generational divide between what Prensky called digital natives and digital immigrants, which I do not see as a generational issue at all but an ability to embrace digital technologies no matter one’s age. In any case, I take it as a challenge in my teaching to begin to understand why there is a misproportion of gender roles represented in digital media at the undergraduate and graduate level, at least in my classes.

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