(2010, October 23). Making multimodal projects: Integrating digital rhetorics and literacies across the curriculum. Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference, Las Cruces, NM.

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.