Questions for 2/10

On p. 174, Dickie Selfe states, “The best way for teachers to learn what they need to know about composing an audio or video composition is to create a practice composition themselves.” At the same time, however, the book seems to be aimed at teachers who might know little about some of the technology involved in such projects. In putting this into practice, then, would it be better for beginners at teaching multimodal composition to start out with something simple, such as just an audio essay, having had time to play with the technology? Would it be too much to handle to give students too much freedom on their choice of multimodal composition types when the teacher has not had enough time to practice with the different technologies?

Journet says that although “other disciplines or departments may be better suited to take on this task,…no other academic unit appears (at least at my institution) eater or willing to do so” (190). In these closing chapters it seems apparent that in order to effectively teach multimodal composition we need to learn it ourselves by doing it. So, essentially, because other departments seem unwilling to do it, we must do it, and in order for us to do it, we need to learn multimodal composition ourselves. While the need for us to learn how to do multimodal composition was touched on earlier in the book, why wait until the end to really nail the point that we need to learn it too in order to teach it? While this seems somewhat obvious, it also seems essential, so why was it not emphasized more before? (Or was I really missing something?)

[NOTE: I had to smile when I saw that Bronwyn Williams wrote the Foreword and Debra Journet wrote the Afterword. Both are professors at the University of Louisville, my alma mater, although I never actually took a class with either of them].