My early inquiry into the multiliteracies approach to teaching college writing focused on teaching writing competency by leveraging the language skills that multilingual students bring to the English-language classroom. The multiliteracies approach discussed in this course expands that study to include not only students’ different language practices but also the different technology-enabled modalities that they can already use to transmit, represent, and create knowledge. Most writing that our students do outside of the classroom is digital writing, and teachers who take advantage of this have traded the pedagogical methods of old - the teaching of the traditional college essay in its many forms - for a new approach to writing instruction in which student-created products include written, visual, and audio representations of knowledge.

I am particularly interested in the way that technology is transforming college writing instruction and found a short but informative introduction to the issue in the Grabill & Hicks (2005) article “Multiliteracies Meet Methods: The Case for Digital Writing in English Education.” The authors begin the article by defining digital writing as writing that is “composed on a computer and distributed via a network” (304) but note that computers are not only tools for writing but that they have changed the “processes, products, and contexts for writing” (303). The advantages of digital writing noted by Grabill & Hicks echo many of the affordances of e-learning cited in the E-learning Ecologies course; they note that digital writing gives students a wider range of forms through which to communicate and that it gives them more agency, as students can produce and distribute their productions (304). The authors also note the pedagogical implications of digital writing, which include the need for instructors to teach students not only how to produce written texts but also how to find and evaluate, or produce themselves the other artifacts of multiliteracy, such as still images and videos (304).

Another important factor mentioned by Grabill & Hicks is the way that digital writing, with its embrace of the multiliterate approach to the representation of knowledge, broadens the social implications of writing. Traditional written documents created for a pedagogical purpose typically share an audience of two - the student creator and the instructor. In contrast, the authors note that “digital writing is socially situated in a collaborative, recursive, and responsive space” (306). Students might create and edit documents together on a space such as Google docs, perform peer review of texts on a learning management system, or leave comments on their classmates’ posts on a class web page. Grabill & Hicks also note that the socially-situated practice of digital writing facilitates greater participation from instructors and more student-instructor interaction, because of increased opportunity for interface and also because of the multiple modalities through which digital documents present knowledge artifacts and appeal to their audiences.

Grabill & Hicks’ text offers this pedagogical challenge to those of us who want to adopt a multiliteracies approach to writing instruction: “What does it mean to communicate with technology and to be multiliterate?” This question brings me back to my early study of multiliteracy and the question I asked myself then: “How can I leverage the language skills my students already have to help them acquire the language skills that they need to learn?” In the teaching of digital writing, this question must be reframed to consider not only how to take advantage of the language skills students bring to the writing classroom but also how to take advantage of the (prodigious) technological skills that they bring to their studies.

Work Cited:

Grabill, J. & Hicks, T. (2005) Multiliteracies meet methods: The case for digital writing in the English education. English Education, 37 (4), 301-11.