This was the year that I pushed myself to think more deeply about multimedia classrooms. That thinking is probably most transparent in the places where I discuss the background images of my two websites:

1)     “Continuities” 

2)     “The Color Purple” 

My graduate course during fall semester, “African American Literacies and Education: The 20th  and 21st Centuries” (ENG 185), was basically a way for me to get my feet wet, so to speak. I created a public website in August 2012 that housed the course.  However, the content of the course was still delivered with mostly print-based materials; that content was just archived digitally.  I openly reflected on each week of class on my blog, “AfroDigital Texts in the Making,” as a way to also create a digital version of each class’s agenda.  I archived the materials for this course at my own website and plan to add subdomains to the site for next year.  This way I can build on the website with more composition-rhetoric courses for undergraduate students.

My undergraduate course, “Unbought and Unbossed: African American Women’s Rhetoric” (ENG 3475), pushed me furthest.  I created a new website in January 2013 that I want to build more in future semesters as a way to create a digital space with and for students that does work on the past, present, and future of black women’s rhetoric. I plan to add subdomains to this website with future courses and projects.  Because of the content and the responses of an absolutely wonderful set of students, I have attempted to be as open and transparent as possible in my thinking on my pedagogy.  Look at the welcome page of the course’s website for those discussions for that.  I also reflect on the conversations and issues that arise in that class on my blog, “AfroDigital Texts in the Making.”  Before the semester even started, I blogged extensively about something that I called my “Anti-Princess Campaign.” Here I discussed stories for black girls that seek to rupture and replace the problematic, racist, white-woman-dominant images and discourses that Disney promotes, images and discourses that I was seeing previous students too brainwashed by.  I especially see this brainwashing as detrimental to the intellectual and psychic vitality of young women of color and so I discussed these politics openly and frankly on my website.  My site’s analytics show me that each day since January, at least one person does a search for exactly these issues and lands at my website.