Supportive practices instructors can use to encourage new media composition

The students interviewed shared a variety of ways they could be better encouraged to engage in new media composition. Three key supportive practices emerged that could be used by instructors:

• Support 1: Provide clear expectations and models of new media assignments [video, 3:13] Referenced eight times throughout the interviews, providing clear guidelines for expectations surrounding the new media projects and models of new media scholarship were the primary ways that graduate students indicated an instructor could encourage them to engage in digital composition.
• Support 2: Provide training on new media composition in class and opportunities for play [video, 2:26] Students also want the opportunity to learn new media tools and techniques in the classroom setting where they can capitalize on the assistance of their instructor and their peers. This support was referenced six times across interviews. As others note in the field of visual rhetoric, students do not often have the opportunity engage in creation first-hand. Rather, “doing” consists of reading and analysis in a “pedagogy of viewer- or reader reception” instead of actual composition (Westbrook 2006, 460).
• Support 3: Encourage risk taking and experimentation [video, 2:37] Instructors can ameliorate graduate students’ fear by explicitly encouraging risk taking and experimentation. This support was referenced five times throughout the interviews. Although he places his warning in the context of writing classrooms, Steve Westbrook’s warning about the reification of print priorities applies just as aptly to our rhetorical course offerings:

  Uncertain of how the transition from print to digital cultures will ultimately affect education in writing and, perhaps, threatened by the pace of developments in multimedia composing technologies, those of us in composition and creative writing tend to rely, sometimes too readily, on the common sense of our fields. That is, we redeploy the lore and paradigms that we have inherited — the advice, warnings, or ways of knowing that the authorities of print culture have given us — whether or not these are entirely appropriate for and ultimately beneficial to writing students of the twenty-first century (2006, 459).

Note: I believe that the most effective way to present my argument regarding key supports is to provide the opportunities for readers/viewers to hear the interview participants’ voices. As a result, the findings and data in this section are presented in video format. Links connect video packages. Segment lengths are included in minutes:seconds format.

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