t.

twenty-first century composition:

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.”

~Karl Marx~

Twenty-first century composition was a topic I chose to discuss with Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University, Carrie Lamanna. The interview explored the ongoing conversation of multimodal pedagogy and the importance of digital technology in a twenty-first century composition program. Lamanna referenced a current dialogue within the field of multimodal pedagogical research, citing the importance of multimodal composition and how it taps into the prior knowledge of students. She also said multimodal pedagogy and digital technology prepares students for their lives beyond the academy. A podcast of the interview with Lamanna was created on 9 Mar. 2010 at CSU (The "Carrie Lamanna Says..." podcast can be listened to here and corresponds with a slide in the below PowerPoint Presentation).

As part of the performance aspect of autoethnography and the nature of my autoethnographic presentation that accompanied the below slideshow, I wanted to turn the act of the presentation itself into an autoethnographic experience (See “auto-e blog” for a definition of autoethnography). The PowerPoint presentation attempts to balance the ethnographic with the autobiographic to enact an autoethnography of myself within the context of a twenty-first century composition classroom and curriculum. I examine myself as a composition instructor in the twenty-first century and how I use multimodal and digital technology with my composition students, how other graduate teaching assistants use technology, and how other full-time composition faculty use new literacies.

My experience has taught me that if I don’t embrace multimodal pedagogy and digital technology in my career as a college composition instructor and as a secondary teacher of English, I am ultimately doing my students a disservice as they enter into the world as twenty-first century composers. However, to achieve the above stated goals, the material conditions of the classroom and institution must align with these ambitions. Lamanna also suggests that failing to teach students how to compose using many modes of composition may raise discrimination issues. To be an effective teacher in the twenty-first century I will be required to teach beyond traditional, alphabetic, print-based modes of composition. Otherwise, I risk limiting the kinds of composition my students will be able to produce. In researching my autoethnographic experience as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at CSU, I considered the following in context of how I used digital technology in the classroom:

• I used Marx’s historical materialism as a framework to gain a sense of “real individuals,” “their activities,” and “the material conditions of their lives.”

• I collected data from my students, other GTAs, and full-time faculty instructors to establish a sense of the cultural context of “real individuals,” myself and my collective “activities.”

• I spoke with information technology specialists at CSU to become more familiar with some of the material conditions of digital technology at the university.

A brief PowerPoint presentation for a course taught by Assistant Professor of English Dr. Sue Doe at CSU, titled E633 – Autoethnography, can be viewed below. The PowerPoint was used as a visual aid to discuss a paper that autoethnographically examined the relationship between the material conditions of digital technology at the university and the implications of this relationship on me as a student and GTA. Below I have included a PowerPoint Presentation and a link to a podcast with Carrie Lamanna:

(Click on above YouTube video to listen to the "Carrie Lamanna says..." podcast, which accompanies Slide 7)

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