My pedagogy in a nutshell:
- Prioritizes multimodality as a function of individual students’ creativity to compose in a variety of genres
- Considers radical revision as a strategy for transferring learning to other disciplines and out-of-classroom rhetorical situations
- Matches an institutional standard of academic excellence with tailoring to individual students’ needs and interests
While I am continually invested in writing as an art of topics, within the realm of first year composition writing I find it more useful to value the more practical model of multimodal writing and its potential to expand assignments. Because while it is impossible to ignore the individual student biases and contexts and texts that every writer is invested in, within the more narrow scope of the classroom, multimodality allows for more traditionally critical assignments to be more obviously creative, more easily adaptable for the writer. In tandem, I value radical revision and its possibilities for writers to think more expansively about creative possibilities for projects that can and must be pushed outside the realm of the classroom.
I am interested in teaching writing as it is learned: in creating an environment where creativity spurs writing rather than a top-down approach. I believe that writing must be individually sourced based on context, individual history, and social situations. My approach attempts to be less prescriptive and more open to the idea that even in a first-year composition class, writing is fundamentally creative even when composing a critical essay. Learned writing also aims for revision to be less regimented and more focused on what the goal of the writer is in the first place with regards to genre, audience, and perspective.
My approach to teaching composition is that students should be able to transfer their knowledge of writing to other studies with low-road adaptation; that is to say, they should be able transfer their skills in composition to other contexts with relative ease across different areas of study and contexts. Multimodality helps in this respect because it is invested in situationally specific composition: it is aware that contemporary writing often involves digital contexts that are not limited to the twenty-six letter alphabet. A multimodal approach also prepares students for circumstances where they must problem-solve; they must choose from an array of modes which one is the most appropriate and which modes are not appropriate. This choice-making is the knowledge that I wish to put forward for my students so that they can go forth from composition to any discipline and choose modes and topics that make the most sense in a given circumstance.
As a student myself, I have found that assignments that are more explicitly creative are much more engaging for me. In an English undergraduate class on queer theory and literature, a professor assigned us a critical analysis essay with the optional creative addition to mimic our chosen text or critique a theory we had studied. I chose to include photography and poetry, both of which I was very invested in as a student. With composing a multimodal response to an assignment, I had much more enthusiasm for my project and understood how this assignment could translate to skills outside of the English and Gender and Women’s Studies disciplines. My goal as a composition instructor is to create such opportunities, that within the schema of critical analysis skills necessary for composition, I also create opportunities for students to come up with their own ideas via video, visual art, creative writing, or other mediums, so that students have their own personal stake in assignments and can go on to other disciplines with such skills.
Writers must be open to the idea that revision is a necessary step in the process of composition. This is an essential point for me in the development of writers, that they see writing as an ongoing process rather than a completed product that needs to be turned in, graded, and put away. I find Sommers’ endorsement of changing genre, focus, audience and perspective in radical revision particularly compelling because it centers the student’s choice in revision rather than proposing top-down revision strategies. Rather than focusing on small grammar mistakes, I want to propose big picture changes that make an assignment useful for students not just in the realm of my classroom but also in their applicability to real life skills and scenarios.
For example, as an ESL tutor in the fall of 2021, I found that many students I was tutoring were frustrated with the task of writing a critical compare and contrast essay–the question for many of them was, what’s the point of this essay? And despite the urging of the teacher that these analytic skills were useful in the real world, many students struggled to figure out how an essay could be translated to a context that they genuinely cared about. As the tutor, it was my job to expand the students’ understanding of the assigned reading and connect their analysis to their own first generation and second language learning experiences. This helped many students organize their essay in new ways and to consider how this essay could be used and shared with their families to create a sense of pride and reflection.
My strategies in teaching writing must center the students’ goals, their own impulses about composition so that they take skills from the classroom not just from a critical standpoint but as a necessarily creative one.
Andie Sheridan 