Any time my students can be part of intentional or purposeful disruption, I’m happy. This isn’t to say I want my students never to trust in what I or their other peers have to say. But it is to say that they should question what is presented to them, especially when it comes to critical analysis and communication. I think specifically to a quote from this week’s reading where Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton explain that using chronology oriented models “assumes that the act of discovery is akin to an archeological process of unearthing pre-existing meaning and that this meaning is ‘found’ prior to engaging multiple modalities.” (44) This makes me think of the frustrations I often face with my students when asking them to grapple with difficult concepts or think of new ways to approach material, but they wait for the ‘right’ answer. Considering that much of their educational experiences, especially in my class, focus on communicating and/or processing primarily through alphabetic text, it’s no wonder they expect the answer to already be written somewhere.
Although thinking about Fulwiler and Middleton’s description of compositing and new recursivity as a disruption to print-centric models of video composing, I wonder if these processes can also be used similarly towards different forms of composing. Rather than focus on one sole product, and a written one at that, we could instead focus on teaching students different tools that can be used simultaneously as they learn them. Teachers know all too well the importance of making learning a meaningful for students, especially if we want them to genuinely be engaged. However, I now think to how often we ask students to generate that meaning versus determining it for them. As mentioned before, when the meaning of something is thought to already exist and be concrete, students are far more likely to want to identify it than challenge or even reinvent it.
“The ‘story’ or the meaning of the narrative needs to remain open to revision and redirection as the composer engages in multiple modalities.” (Fulwiler & Middleton, 44) If we think about our final assessments, they often provide prompts that ask students to focus on a specific meaning that has either already been pointed out or that they can identify and support with use of the text. But in thinking about keeping narratives open to revision and redirection, what if students were able to analyze narratives through multiple and interconnected modalities and then analyzed how the meaning of the text changed based on the modality. An assessment like this, could potentially, have students focus on process and the impact/effect modalities have on how we understand the world around us. Could you imagine the possibilities?
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