Mahon, Wade. (2011). Multimodal composition & the rhetoric of teaching: A conversation with Cheryl Ball. Issues in Writing 18(2).

abstract

Cheryl Ball is an Associate Professor of New Media Studies at Illinois State University where she teaches courses on multimodal composition as well as digital media, composition theory, and digital publishing. She gives talks and workshops on these topics around the country and has published and collaborated on a number of articles, edited collections, book chapters, and webtexts as well. She has also co-authored with Kristin Arola a textbook, Visualizing Composition. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the editor of the electronic journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. IW editor Wade Mahon spoke with Ball by phone on June 23, 2011.

accompanying materials

• pre-print interview transcript

description (from proposal)
A collaborative session with two of my textbook co-authors (Kristin Arola and Jennifer Sheppard).

I will discuss the practicalities of writing a collaborative textbook project with authors who share a theoretical and pedagogical approach but who haven’t collaborated as a group and are not co-located. This presentation will discuss how the authors modeled their own textbook’s approach to designing multimodal projects, following the same mistakes and having the same successes our students have when writing. This speaker will provide a meta-narrative of the book’s coming to fruition (even as it is still a work in progress, and we invite feedback on its current iteration, to be shown in the panel). We will detail, for instance, some of the collaborative techniques and technological programs we used, our internal and editorial negotiations to determine the *kind* of textbook we wanted (materially, theoretically, and practically), and the realizations we made about our assumptions in teaching writing to English majors (even in new media ways, as we do), but how we mistakenly dismissed first-year students taking Writing 101 as a possible audience for our book in the quest of creating a book useful to our colleagues teaching multimodal projects in their business, politics, and biology classes. We will provide examples from our writing process, to show the book-in-progress, and to show how this narrative of writing for students is formed on the idea that, as teachers of rhetoric and writing, we can never divorce our theoretical understanding of writing and the research of writing from our pedagogical approaches, either in the classroom or in writing for the classroom.

description
I discuss an undergraduate writing class where students learn to read, peer review, and write their own digital scholarship that draws on multiple media and modes of production (audio, video, graphics, written text, HTML, etc.) to enact their arguments. I describe how students transfer their alphabetic writing processes to multimedia, using example projects and reflections to show their learning.

accompanying materials

English summary

French summary

poster for talk, designed by Michele Melanie

abstract
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy has been publishing digital media scholarship since 1996, and each new medium and digital technology offers authors changing ways that they can make meaning through visual, aural, linguistic, and other modes of communication. As editor of Kairos, it is my responsibility to understand the often cutting-edge and genre-bending moves authors make in their submissions to this rhetoric and composition journal. I will present a few examples of submissions (historical and recent) that required the staff and editorial board members to re-negotiate the ever-changing boundaries between ‘typical’ digital scholarship and “new media scholarship,” exemplified by the relationship between the visual and the linguistic (i.e., written).

accompanying materials

• Prezi presentation