Using Multimodal Composing Processes andE-Portfolios to Develop Students’ Abilities

to Engage with Emotion

Martha Wilson Schaffer, Bowling Green State University

Emotional Literacy

21st Century EnglishesA literacy of affect is one of the Englishes that is

important in the 21st Century, and what better place to explore affects than in the expansive, complex,

and developing space of multimodality that is offered to us by our newest digital technologies?

“we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective”

Affective EconomiesSara Ahmed (2004)

Doing Emotion, Micciche (2007)

“Tendencies to think of emotions as only personally experienced and felt are simply not adequate to describe how emotions take form and are coded as appropriate or inappropriate within communities.”

“a desire to make rhetoric continually accountable to wider sensory and experiential realms and to expand rhetoric’s province beyond the effects we have on one another to the larger context of how the resources we use to ‘effect’ get constituted as effectual”

“performative and embodied”

Emotional Literacy

the process of developing digital or electronic portfolios as fertile ground for students to explore how they feel about writing, about themselves as writers and to engage with how our experience of knowledge and information has an emotional or affective component, as well as a cognitive one

A 21st Century English

Digital literacy is an affective enterprise.

Affinity

“an enduring attraction toward literacy, expressed and reinforced by affective and bodily experience” (Bowen)

Hesitancy

many composition teachers—raised and educated in the age and the landscapes of print—feel hesitant about the task of designing, implementing and evaluation assignments that call for multimodal texts (Takayoshi & Selfe)

Affect in Multimodal Composition & Eportfolios: Composing Identity

“Box-Logic”“many composition teachers—raised and educated in the age and the landscapes of print—feel hesitant about the task of designing, implementing and evaluation assignments that call for multimodal texts—texts that incorporate words, images, video, and sound. . . . It is a difficult situation, and composition instruction is poised on the precipice of the change “(Sirc)

Machinic assemblageA Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari

“continually dismantling” and “causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate”

“Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has everything to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.”

Palimpsests & Mapping (Yancey 2009)

“the ability to personalize their e-portfolios contributes to their motivation to ‘work’ on it throughout the year as well as their engagement in the process”

“e-portfolios [can] foster the development of noncognitive traits as well . . . such . . . as behaviors and attitudes, such as the ability to work with others”

Identity & Portfolios

(Yancey 2004)

“Through practice, we compose identity, task by rhetorical task, moment by reflective moment. Identity itself is a composition. The relationship between identity and the digital portfolio is reciprocal, hence the importance of both print and digital.”

Affect in the Implementation of Eportfolio Systems

Eportfolio Trends

“FYC programs that have transitioned to an e-portfolio are not choosing the tool for specific benefits it brings to multimodal composing.”

“FYC schools/programs tend to pick what technically worked even if FYC programs find the tools counteract portfolio pedagogy.”

(Tulley 2013)

21st Century Literacy

“once we learn to name the presence of emotion in pedagogical goals, administrative work, and intellectual commitments, we must also admit a language and a framework for understanding emotion as that which cannot be reduced to an appeal, a play on feelings, or a resource operating outside reason and meaning” (Micciche, 2007)

Thank you for your time and attention today!

mschaff@bgsu.edu

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. (2004). “Affective economies.” Social Text 79.22, 117-139.

---------. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bowen, Lauren Marshall. “Resisting Age Bias in Digital Literacy Research.” CCC 62.4 (June 2011): 586-607.

Hawisher, G. E. & Selfe, C. L. (1999). Passions, pedagogie,s and 21st century technologies. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Micciche, L. (2007). Doing emotion: rhetoric, writing, teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers,Inc.

National Writing Project. Because Digital Writing Matters. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

Selfe, Cynthia L., ed. Multimodal Composition Resources for Teachers, Cresskill: Hampton Press, Inc., 2007. Print

Sirc, Geoffrey. “Box Logic.” Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Eds Anne Wysocki, et al. Logan: Utah State Univ. Press, 2004. 111-146.

Tulley, C. (2013). “Migration patterns: A status report on the transition from paper to eportfolios and the effect on multimodal composition initiatives.” Computers and Composition, 30, 101-114.

Yancey, K. B. (2009). “Electronic portfolios a decade into the twenty-first century: What we know, what we need to know.” Peer Review, Winter, 28-32.

---- (2004). “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work.” CCC 55, 4, 738-761.