In this weeks reading, specifically in Track 2: Current-Traditional Multimedia, Palmeri focuses on the relationships students have with alphabetic writing, as well as multimodal writing. As I mentioned in my last post, my students often dread the thought of writing essays which partly is because of the standardized final product driven culture they often find themselves at the center of. Chapter three, however, forced me to reflect on how the experiences my students have with formal writing are shaped within my classroom. Palmeri mentions Wieners suggestion that “many students have come to fear the act of alphabetic writing as a result of...experiences when they were penalized (with red pen) for making errors.” (95) While I’ve often felt the temptation to want to do away with traditional writing and focus primarily on creative forms of expression and communication, I fully understand that the educational world we currently attempt to thrive under requires a balance between these two realms.
In thinking of Wieners suggestion, I think about how we can use multimodal writing as almost a reintroduction to the alphabetic writing experience students have. One of the disadvantages of alphabetic writing is it can feel very isolating and one audience member, typically the teacher, centered. Burnett and Thomason discuss a potential solution in scripted narration where “students learn to write a script ‘for a listening rather than reading public’ as well as to consider how their images should be arranged to compliment their spoken words”. (99) Facilitating the space for students to produce for an audience that isn’t just their teacher, and in a way where they can communicate not solely for reading could potentially transform how students think about alphabetic writing in the future.
Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: a History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
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