For nearly 2 years now, I have been the co-convenor (with Dr Sherilyn Lennon) of Griffth University’s New Materialisms (NM) Special interest Group (SIG). We meet each month to read, discuss and experiment with New Materialisms approaches in teaching, learning and research. It is also the framing I am using for my bikes-for-education PhD project.
For this months’ New Materialisms session, we were delighted to host our first international presenter Assoc. Prof. Thomas Reynolds (Dept. of Writing Studies, Uni of Minnesota).
I met Tom after I emailed him following a session he did for an international online teaching conference. Despite the time differences (it was hosted by an Israeli Uni so the international timezone shift was brutal for Aussie attendees – Tom’s session was on at 10 pm Brisbane time), I still attended his session, but they ran out of time for questions. I reached out to him and we got email chatting and I invited him to (re)present for our NM SIG. And he said yes!
Title: Multimodality: digital video and the materiality of academic writing.
Tom’s research interests include critical theories of writing instruction, histories of popular literacy, and intersections of literacy and cultural movements. He is currently writing about multimodality in writing instruction. Tom teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in writing and literacy studies. His classes typically write in and study current media.
Abstract
I have been thinking about how to set new ground for the teaching and learning of writing through a lens of multimodality. In particular, in addition to asking my students to read and write traditional academic texts, I’ve asked them to make group digital videos that advocate for issues that are important to them.
With new materialist ideas, I’m interested in helping students see how their work on these projects might involve engagement with both discursive and non-discursive elements. The attached readings explore writing through a non-discursive and, in Cooper’s case, post-humanist framework.
The ideas for this project are exploratory for me at this stage and will hopefully lead to an article.
What we did
This session was an engaging, fun and productive exploration of Tom’s current project on multimodality, literacy digital video and the materiality of academic writing.
We discussed the two articles and collated some standout concepts (see image) then had a lively conversation following Tom’s presentation about many things, including: who holds power on campus, how to (affectively?) tracing emotional responses to places/space, going on a ‘sound diet’, habituated bodily responses to sound, and territorialising/mapping campus s/p/places as a class/student activity – wow!
It was a real delight to enter a completely different world …that of Tom’s class practice. Each session we get stretched and pulled in different ways and it really helps us to stay open-minded and flexible in our thinking and experimentation.
The discussions were animate, fun and productive – it was a real pleasure to flex our intellectual muscles and share the ideas and lines of flights that emerge for each of us from the conversations, reading and links to our research.
I found Tom’s session and his work to be inspiring and generative – I’d love to be a student in his class!
It also gave me a lot to think about how I teach and holding space for others to tell stories, narratives and learnings via different modalities – a very stimulating session!
Other takeaways included:
- How do our habits of thinking and paying attention help us (and our students) transform our writing/understanding/being?
- How to give students agency to choose their own passion, to fuel their multimodal creations which (hopefully) leads to better “products” outcomes, but also creative processes leading up to those endpoints?
Readings:
Ceraso, S. (2014). (re)educating the senses: Multimodal listening, bodily learning, and the composition of sonic experiences. College English, 77(2), 102-123.
Cooper, M. M. (2019). Enchanted writing. (pp. 19-44). University of Pittsburgh Press.
