Teaching Multiwriting

Formulaic ways to train students in composition and rhetoric are no longer effective, say authors Robert L. Davis and Mark F. Shadle. Scholar-teachers must instead reinvent the field from the inside. ""Teaching Multiwriting: Researching and Composing with Multiple Genres, Media, Disciplines, and Cultures"" presents just such a reinvention with multiwriting, an alternative, open approach to composing that spans genres, media, disciplines, and cultures. The authors argue for supplanting the outdated research paper assignment with research projects that use multiple forms to explore questions that cannot be fully answered, seeking to open the minds of both authors and readers to new understandings. Multiwriting remains tied to the traditions of composition, rhetoric, and discourse studies but encourages students to link personal and academic passions, say the authors. They assert that this composition approach promotes lifelong learning by putting questions at the center of the student experience, thus giving students choices about how to research, write, and present their discourses in relation to their subjects, purposes, audiences, and occasions. ""Teaching Multiwriting"" illustrates how multiwriting supports freedom, innovation, and connection of content and form. Projects might have visual, aural, cinematic, or architectural components and can come in such forms as CDs, PowerPoint presentations, poems, and posters. This innovative volume, which is geared to composition teachers at all levels, includes sixteen helpful illustrations and provides classroom exercises and projects for each chapter.