Writing and New Technologies
MULTIMODAL PRAXIS IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM: FOSTERING CREATIVE CRITICAL DISCOURSE ON DIGITAL IDENTITIES THROUGH AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
Nicola Joan Wilson Clasby
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, U.S.A.
Digital media shapes student identities in and out of the classroom. The degree to which students are aware of the hegemonic forces at work here is a highly contested, political issue. Engagement in digitized writing platforms and multimodal assignments, I argue, demands critical examination of the nature of this pedagogy within the student’s personal digital matrix. The goal of critical pedagogy is to empower students to understand the links between power and knowledge in order to resist hegemonic forces and dominant ideologies (Giroux). However, Wendy Hesford argues, because critical pedagogy is a form of praxis, it is difficult to implement and maintain. Hesford calls for teachers to engage in sitespecific autobiographical acts as interventionist praxis. I take up Hesford’s call in order to address the challenges our digital culture poses for students and writing instructors in a qualitative research study, “Totally (Un)Wired”: Media Abstinence & Creative Resistance in the Writing Classroom.” Students from a universitylevel English Composition course were required to conduct autoethnographic research and collect comprehensive data on their digital interactions over a 24hour period, then abstain from them. Data was analyzed and critiqued resulting in photoessays, reports, interviews and critical conclusions. These assignments disrupted and challenged students’ perceptions of themselves as powerful, independent, popular, smart, socially adept, free individuals. Through narrative inquiry of student texts, this study explores the process of how students uncover their role in supporting hegemonic forces and dominant ideologies, and how this knowledge is used to critically reevaluate their identities within the media matrix.
References
Giroux, Henry A., 2011, On critical pedagogy , New York: Continuum.
Harris, Rochelle, 2004, Encouraging emergent moments: the personal, critical, and rhetorical in the writing classroom. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 4(3), pp. 401417.
Qualley, Donna, 1997, Turns of thought: teaching composition as reflexive inquiry , Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann.