Material Conditions

Since implementation of multiliterate approach demands regular study, and research by, and professional development opportunities for, writing teachers, the program they belong to should devise a way to motivate them to learn things as they evolve, including the theory and technology of literacy. That basically means their respective programs must ensure fair working conditions for all their faculty members—tenured, non-tenured, adjuncts, graduate students, and part-timers. The teachers operating under deplorable and grueling working conditions (Ianetta;

Crowley; Wardle; O’Neill; Bousquet; Schell; Scott; Ede), and required to teach large-size classes, won't have time, energy, and motivation to individualize course syllabi or assignments for any of the classes they teach, nor would they have obligation to attend any professional development sessions planned for them or publish scholarship in the field. Given the current hierarchy between tenured and non-tenured, full-time and part-time, and English and

composition faculty, maintained through discrepancy in remuneration, benefit package, and job security, it could be challenging for any WPA or department chair to engage all their

constituencies in any departmental or inter-departmental conversations or initiatives, including curricular and pedagogical transformations.

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Therefore, for the successful implementation of a multiliterate approach to composition, a decent working condition—which includes pay, benefit package, manageable workload, and job security, among others—for all teachers should be a priority. Improving the material conditions of adjuncts, part-timers, graduate teaching assistants, and non-tenure faculty in particular involves politics and economics beyond a department or a program, yet the action should start from the unit where the issue lies i.e. the writing program or the English department itself. There have been numerous proposals in the rhetoric and composition scholarship for ways to

improving curriculum and appropriately responding to labor issue of writing teachers

(Wardle--“Writing about Writing” approach; Crowley—eliminating First-year composition; Harris—

faculty at all ranks teaching First-year classes; Debra Dew—“writing with specific content” (qtd in Wardle); Bousquet—agitation and protest against unfair labor conditions; and Marback, and Miller et al—improvement in graduate program in rhetoric and composition and English studies). The fundamental idea underlying all these proposals is that writing teachers should be given a decent salary, reasonable teaching load, stable job, and a full benefit package—a fair pay in return to good teaching. In addition to fair pay, the writing program should also provide writing teachers with professional development opportunities by allocating funds for conference presentations, and research and publishing activities. In the same vein, these individuals should be entitled to research leave and occasional refresher courses inside and outside the department.

In a personal communication with me, Matsuda underscores such activities in the department as critical for a pedagogical shift, stating that conversations, engagements, and workshops are key to implementing gradual changes in people’s assumptions about language, literacy as well as the goals of composition classes. Therefore, the demands are that WPAs, and chairs encourage these kinds of conversations in the departments to discuss specific issues writing teachers are facing in

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implementing multimodal or multiliterate pedagogy or in working with diverse students in writing classrooms.

Along side professional development opportunities, teachers also need to gain access to resources necessary to implement curricular and pedagogical plans in the class. A department or program alone might not be able to provide all kinds of resources to its faculty. Therefore, inter-departmental cooperation should be made a part of academic culture. Given the range of

disciplines we can draw on or have already drawn on to expand our pedagogical purview, closer work with allied departments, such as linguistics, information technologies, education,

communication and rhetoric, and such could benefit our faculty members by giving them access to both human and non-human resources, as well as by affording them opportunities for

academic exchanges.

A lot of these preparations for future diversity in our classes falls onto the shoulder of program administrators, even though the major share of the burden falls into structures larger than programs or departments in the university hierarchy. Yet program administrators can do some crucial things with regards to the implementation of a multiliterate pedagogy. They can, for instance, allocate funds for faculty and infrastructure development. They can foreground

multiliteracy objectives in their program missions, and encourage faculty members to incorporate both traditional and new literacies into their curricula. At times, they can also arbitrate between multiliterate enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts, and compensate for the amount of labor writing teachers put to work in order to upgrade themselves to take up multiliterate approach to

composition. No wonder, Matsuda sees WPAs as people having latitude to steer the program in a particular direction. According to him, one of the things WPAs do is to create and implement policies, and he demands that their policies reflect the classroom realities and realities of their

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teachers. Similarly, he argues that WPAs can and should provide resources for teachers’

professional development and encourage teachers to use those resources to make multiliteracies a reality in the classroom. He also wants WPAs to be role models for other teachers. He notes that in order to inspire others to embrace mutliteracies, WPAs themselves need to understand

multiliteracies in its complexities, as far as is possible. They, then, should create an

administrative structure where a multiliteracies specialist can inform various decisions and policies, assess classroom practices and curriculum structures, and provide resources and

professional development opportunities that are necessary for teachers to embrace multiliteracies in curriculum and pedagogies.

5.2.4. Assessment

Assessment of projects produced under multiliterate composition pedagogy and

curriculum could be a challenge for teachers. Students could produce projects in different modes and in varied forms based on the type of assignments and students’ own positionalities.

Therefore, standard traditional assessment criteria would fall short in providing evaluation guidelines for that range of projects. I revised traditional criteria for evaluating the argument essay by adding components of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and cross-stylistic negotiation. I did not punish translingiual or multimodal practice even in the argument essay, nor did I discourage transnational source use or the evolving thesis in the spirit of an exploratory essay form. For the multimodal assignments in particular, I drew ideas from Cheryll E. Ball’s Technical Communication Quarterly article “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia,” which underlines some smart ways of assessing rhetorical and design elements in multimodal compositions. She puts her criteria in a formulaic form as Kuhn +2; she appropriates Virginia Kuhn’s four parameters of assessment: 1. Conceptual core; 2. Research component; 3. Form and

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content; and 4. Creative realization, and then adds two of her own in the list: audience and timeliness. In short, I looked at the rhetorical efficacy of web design and documentary making projects by focusing on idea, source use, relationship between form and content, creative approach to the topic, and sensitivity to audience and socio-historical context. But, an area that future research should focus on is to develop appropriate criteria for evaluating projects in multiple media and in hybrid languages and modes of representation. Selfe also finds assessment a very tricky job because she does not want assessment to be an assessment of students’ “selves,”

but of their works. Therefore, she tries to design the projects in such a way that students have as much access as possible to the resources they need in order to make a project succeed. She also makes sure that there is a clear rhetorical purpose, a clear rhetorical audience, and a clear sense of what information needs to be included in the project. Similarly, she makes sure that each assignment she designs has a clear sense of genre because we have to cover genre, especially in multiliterate projects. If we can do that, then she thinks that assessment could be easier for us (personal communication). Matsuda, on the other hand, maintains that while assessing students’

projects, we need to take into account what is valued outside the academy. Given the multilingual reality of today’s classroom, he argues that grammar assessment should be reconsidered. In fact, he speaks against grammar assessment—no points for the grammar and mechanics at the least, if not complete abandonment of grammar correction. Therefore, he advocates for point addition system as opposed to point subtraction in assessment. That, he thinks, is the best way to go about assessing students’ multiliterate and multilingual projects (personal communication). In his WPA article, he speaks about what he terms instructional alignment as part of assessment strategy, which he describes as:

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The intended outcomes defines what students are supposed to learn in the course or the program; instructional processes provide knowledge, skills, strategies and awareness that are necessary for students to reach the intended outcomes;

instructional assessment measures whether students have achieved the kind and degree of learning stipulated by the outcomes. (“Let’s Face It…” 143).

With this statement, he suggests writing teachers only assess the skills that we explicitly teach in the class. What this means in relation to diverse students and their plural writing and linguistic conventions in the class is that teachers should assess language/grammar issues to the extent taught in the class, and not punish them for what we do not teach or can not teach in a semester.

Assessing multimedia is still a challenge we need to tackle sooner or later. Therefore, future research should come up with more specific and tangible evaluation criteria so that our assessment encourages multiliterate practices rather than discourages innovative and

experimental spirits in our diverse students.

5.3. Reimagining Student Writers and Reconceiving Language and Culture for