We have two reading strategies for this class. Sometimes, we will all read the same thing at the same time (we will call that a communal assignments). At other times, we will use a method called a Jigsaw. The jigsaw is a popular strategy for collaborative assignments. It means that the article/text that you read will be different from your colleagues and so, in turn, you need to educate your colleague about what you have studied.
When we veer off on our own in the Jigsaw method, make sure that you choose the reading assignment that you like MOST.
In this part of the course, we will read one text as a comunity and one text you will choose on your own based on the subpages at the left.
This is our Communal Text:
"Thinking about Multimodality" by Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe
| It is fast becoming a common place that digital composing environments are challenging writing, writing instruction, and basic understandings of the different components of the rhetorical situation (writers, readers, texts) to change. Such changes are both significant and far reaching—and they promise to be disruptive for many teachers of English composition. For many such teachers at both the secondary and collegiate levels, the texts that students have produced in response to composition assignments have remained essentially the same for the past 150 years. They consist primarily of words on a page, arranged into paragraphs. This flow of words is only occasionally interrupted by titles, headings, diagrams, or footnotes... And the papers that stu- dents submit in response to these conventional assignments have remained essentially the same: 8.5 by 11 inch pages, double-spaced, 1-inch-margins, 12 or 10 inch fonts. Thus, while time marches on outside of U.S. secondary and college classrooms, while people on the Internet are exchanging texts composed of still and moving images, animations, sounds, graphics, words, and colors, inside many of these classrooms, students are producing essays that look much the same as those produced by their parents and grandparents. Why the astonishing lack of change in both classroom assignments and student-authored writing?
Please Note: When you click the link for any article that has copyright protection, you have to log in to this system to see the article. You will get a message that says: "The e-Portfolio you are trying to reach is not accessible to the public. Please login and try again." Use the small sheet of paper distributed in class with your ePortfolio username and password to gain access. It may ask you to input information as a first-time user but that should be straightforward. You will be taken to a special, protected page with many PDFs there. Choose the PDF that corresponds with these authors, Takayoshi & Selfe. |