The findings of my case study on a seventh-grader’s blogging practices were somewhat disappointing.  Despite my occassional attempts to teach Olivia embodied, multi-modal, and digital composing practices, I found that when faced with an academic essay assignment, Olivia composed within the comforting confines of “pen and paper.”[1] As a researcher, I observed Olivia’s practices without interference.  During our case study observation and interview, my behavior mimicked that of Janet Emig in her “Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders.”  I was careful to remain mostly silent—allowing Olivia’s practices to surface without influence.  However, my relationship with Olivia cannot be defined solely as subject-and-researcher.  I am also her teacher—a position which invites me to interrupt her current practices in order to better understand how more emphasis on digital, multi-modal composing will re-shape her writing conceptions and habits.

Image of Wunderkammer ("wonder closet") taken from Creative Commons image on Google.com/image search.

Earlier this year, Susan Delagrange published a digital article on visual arrangement in Kairos:  A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.  Within an intertextual, multi-modal framework, Delagrange examines and practices “critical wonder,” or the process of imaginative and thoughtful discovery via digital (or tactile) design.  She compares the wunderkammern (or “wondrous cabinets”/“wonder rooms” popular in the 16^th and 17^th century) to current digital constructs, linking the two very different realms through the phenomenon of (what I understand to be) chaotic composing.  Just as wunderkammern offered observers strange occasion for linking seemingly disparate concepts, our current interactive digital realms offer us “new opportunities to ‘perform’ our pedagogy as a productive, rhetorically rich art, and to compose texts and make meaning that are not possible in traditional print” (Delagrange “Performance”).  Calls for digital creation in Rhetoric and Composition appear early in the 21^st century,[1] and Delagrange’s article both examines and responds to that call.  The digital article—http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange—is itself a series of intertexts, images, videos, and other elements arranged in space.  It creates from disparate parts a whole framework that shows how visual arrangement can be used as a method of knowledge-making.

Inspired by Susan Delagrange’s new insights, I aim to examine the digital and multi-modal practice of visual arrangement in the composing practices of both Olivia and myself.  I will begin my project by returning to Olivia’s blogging reflections, offering a more sustained gaze at her practices and conceptions of academic writing before and after her blogging experience.  A short introduction into her blogging practices—and their strange lack of influence on her academic web writing—offers me an opportunity to defend my work.  Why is it that when faced with an academic essay, Olivia did not take advantage of the digital and multi-modal exercises we’d performed so successfully earlier in the semester?  Asking this question allows me to transition to the theoretical underpinnings of my project:  Dunn’s multi-modal literacies, Yancey’s call for web circulation, and Delagrange’s insights into visual arrangement.  Such theories inform the heart of my research:  Accounts of visual arrangement exercises performed by Olivia (and me as I create my project).  It is particularly interesting to apply these new college-level approaches to a younger learner, who currently sits at the entrance to a more digital world.  To defend my contribution, I might cite the average age that students join Facebook or own a cell phone.  By practicing these modes with our students rather than keeping such practices outside of the realm of learning, we are able to monopolize on their desire to enter the digital, communicative world.

When I say I will explore my practices, I mean that my article will take the shape of a digital journey.  Similar to “A Composition in Film,” my preliminary idea is to incorporate my process of creating the digital article into the digital article itself.  I will rely on the digital mastery of Jay @ Langsam’s STRC to help train me on web-page creation, digital design, and media.  My hope is to embrace a stylistic presentation suitable for web-publication on a professional digital journal like Computers and Composition, which requests work that is “intended for the web.”  If such a journal publication is out of my reach, I believe this project would be a very interesting conference presentation suited to CCCC.

Doostdar, Alireza.  “‘The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging’:  On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan.”  American Anthropologist 106.4 (2004):  651-662.

Emig, Janet. The Web of Meaning: Essays on Writing, Teaching, Learning, and Thinking. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1983.

Hesse, Douglas D.  “2005 CCCC Chair’s Address:  Who Owns Writing?”  College Composition and Communication 57.2 (2005):  335-57.

Lundin, Rebecca Wilson.  “Teaching with Wikis.”  Computers and Composition 25 (2008):  432-48.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake.  “Made Not Only in Words.”  College Composition and Communication 56.2 (2004):  297-328.

Zawilinski, Lisa.  “HOT Blogging:  A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking.”  The Reading Teacher 62.8 (2009):  650-661.