Social Media for Multimodal Composition

Although many teachers of rhetoric expect their students to only study and utilize the written word, rhetoric does exist in other media. In such a digital age, to provide practical instruction for the present time and place, our rhetoric classes must incorporate a more modal approach to study and composition.

In an attempt to keep her instruction relevant to the new digital age, A UT at Dallas Graduate Student, Barbara Vance, incorporated multimodal composition to her rhetoric class. Vance, who had great success with her multimodal approach, wrote about the experience in a piece on AcademHack entitled "A Model for Teaching Writing." In relation to her approach, Vance wrote that "as it stands now, most rhetoric courses focus strictly on writing, and they limit assignments to the classroom environment – practices that devalue other rhetorical mediums, and the purpose of rhetoric itself." Although traditional classrooms are social environments, they are "isolated" to a degree--at least in terms of in class writing assignments and discussions--from the outside world. Further, traditional classrooms are rooted in text-based, printed compositions.

What Vance sought to do, and what she is encouraging fellow teachers to do, is incorporate a more multimodal approach to student composition and join the current, digital age. As the author notes, rhetoric is exercised in a social environment. Vance writes, "Requiring students to blog, contact people outside their classroom, and post writing on the Internet teaches them to engage with the community, gives their writing more significance, and supports rhetoric – a term that, by definition, implies community." Writing can--and should be--collaborative at various steps in the composing and disseminating process. This is where social media can be integral in the composition classroom--in the collaboration of writing assignments.

Vance also asserts, "Creating work in a vacuum delegitimizes it. When the goal of your course is to teach students to persuade, and you don’t include what is now the most influential tool for disseminating your argument, you are crippling your students." To meet these needs, Vance had students work from a website and compose throughout the semester using a blog. Finally, she had the students create a film based on writing in their initial essays.

Describing the interrelated class assignments, Vance explains "The first essay required them to identify an issue in their local community and write about it. From these, the students voted on which would be made into a film. The second major writing assignment was a visual essay in which the students each described how they would make the film, supporting their paper with images they found online or took themselves." Then the students created a film which would be uploaded to their class website to be viewed by those outside the class.

As Vance noted, "The blog, the group film – everything the students – did was about engaging the world, establishing a presence, and utilizing the tools that the rest of the world is operating with, rather than limiting them to traditional print-based technology."

Here, the approach is to make composition more relevant to the current world in which students are writing, and to get them engaged in the writing process. By utilizing social media--blogs and a website which would share a class composed video--composition in Vance's writing class to become more relevant and engaging for her students.