Multimodal Writing in the Digital Age
Dr. Cruz Medina
Alfredo Celedón Luján
July 21, 2018
Philosophy of Recursive Remixing
My video demonstrates my career long philosophy of alphabetic writing and my newly discovered philosophy of recursive composition. I have to admit that I’m old school about alphabetic writing. Students need to know how to write. Fulwiler and Middleton say, “prewrite/write/rewrite” (alphabetic writing) precede “script/film/edit” (Industrial Age Digital Story Telling). “Composing and new recursivity are two terms that disrupt a print-centric model of video composing by acknowledging the invention and discovery potential of all of the modalities: alphabetic text, still and moving image, and sound” say Fulwiler and Middleton (44) … ‘The montage may appear seamless as a result of a careful editorial, rhetorical process, but one can still uncover the edges between the grafts’”[Reid, 135]. The five paragraph esasay has evolved.
In Remixing Composition, Jason Palmeri writes, “ … digital technologies increasingly enable students to compose tests that blend images, sounds, and words” (28). The new buzz is recursive composition; this writing process intermixes multi moving, still, aural, and alphabetic text imagery. The recursive composition, thus, becomes a multimodal essay, ese.
My “Recursive Remix” exemplifies my philosophy of teaching composition by using multimodal elements to demonstrate learning: teaching, writing, reading, speaking, listening and viewing. My students and my colleagues bring life, thus understanding, to three texts: Letters from Heaven; The Case of the Missing Pen; and Chapter three, paragraph one, of The Grapes of Wrath; they write, act, dance, speak, and draw. This is a recursive remix of my Multimodal Educational Philosophy -- my MEP.
In this multimodal text, my students and colleagues write, act, dance, speak, and draw. I consider this multimodal comprehension, and in educational lingo, it is differentiated Instruction and/or accommodation for all students. Anne-Marie Womack writes, “Accommodation is the most basic act and art of teaching. It is not the exception we sometimes make in spite of learning, but rather the adaptions we continually make to promote learning” (1). This multimodal composition intermixes moving, still, aural, and alphabetic text imagery in narrative form to exemplify multimodal learning.
I had to make some hard decisions; namely, I had to cut videos and still images that complemented the text. These decisions had to made to conserve time and space. They were images I loved but had to cut. I included imagery, gestures, and dialogue that showed students having fun in their class multiple class activities, while learning. I am a novice to recursive remixing, so I had some problems with editing my iMovie. Adjusting the audio and visual tracks by grabbing the ends delicately so as not to delete them or alter them was very time consuming.
I did succeed in capturing imagery that was relevant to my philosophy. I was happy with the outcome, though I know that it’s slightly longer than I had intended. I will edit/revise again even after the class has been completed. Ultimately, I believe that what I learned in this class and through this remediation process is that it is potentially a life-time process, like the act of alphabetic writing itself.
A paper-project-story always has potential for a recast/remix.
