Multimodality in the Classroom

Exploring the Possibilities

Thursday, December 07, 2006

"The Case for Writing Studies as a Major Discipline" - an essay by Charles Bazerman

Since multimodal composing is essentially a new genre of writing, I thought it would be interesting to investigate Charles Bazerman’s essay “The Case for Writing Studies as a Major Discipline” in which the author makes an appeal for post-secondary institutions to put a heavier emphasis on the teaching of writing skills. While reading this article, I couldn’t help but consider some ways for multimodality to aid in this fight for legitimacy.

In this persuasive piece, Bazerman acknowledges the relatively small devotion within academia toward studying and teaching writing technique. “Only the relatively young field of composition has paid primary attention to writing,” he writes. “Composition is best positioned to begin to put together the large, important, and multidimensional story of writing. We are the only profession that makes writing its central concern” (33).

When describing the “large, important, and multidimensional story of writing,” one must include multimodality as a subsection of the larger art. With the fusion of technology and traditional writing techniques, writing studies have spawned a new subset of composing across genres. Already, we see multimodality in the synergy of the business world, where employees use intranet networking, in-house video production agencies, written and electronic documents, and personal meetings and discussions to communicate efficiently with one another. Furthermore, print, radio, and television advertisers continually develop and bombard consumers with new multimodal messages daily. Indirectly acknowledging the rise in popularity of multimodal compositions in our everyday lives, Bazerman persists, “It is time to recognize that writing provides some of the fundamental mechanisms that make our world work, and it is time to assert that writing needs to be taken seriously along with other major matters of inquiry supported by institutional structures” (34).

Bazerman alludes here to the same point uncovered by our More Real-World Multimodal Investigation discussion earlier. In this day and age, it is quite possible to find the influence of writing studies, and specifically multimodal compositions, in classrooms across the country; however, there seems to be a lack of overall institutional support for such advancements beyond what instructors independently bring to the table. Bazerman sees this discrepancy and argues, “we need to understand more fully the ways in which technologies are reshaping these writing experiences, how the technologies may provide new kinds of support, and how people move through various supportive literate technologies throughout their lives” (35). There is value in this genre of communication that has yet to be realized by our colleges and universities.

Writing is in danger of being put on the backburner of education even though it is perhaps the greatest tool that our schools can offer. With growing technologies, writing is pushing into the electronic world and new avenues of composition are being explored. “Such studies must remain a major concern [for our schools],” explains Bazerman, “because learning to write will remain a major imperative in education and society for the foreseeable future (even though forms and occasions of writing may shift rapidly with the [development] of information technologies) (34). Multimodal composing, a newly uncovered arena within the world of writing, is ready to be taken seriously.