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The notions of remediation (Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter), and media convergence (Henry Jenkins) speak to the changing face of media, communication, and literacy including composition or writing. These formulations also inform much of the discussions of new media or multimedia compositions and pedagogies in rhetoric and composition (Cathy Yancey, Steven Fraiberg). In this presentation, I argue that a sound pedagogical approach for teaching writing in its expanded sense (not just a traditional academic essay but a full range of old and new media compositions including websites and movies) such as a multiliterate composition pedagogy that I propose and implement in my writing classes should incorporate these foundational theories of media along side recent conversations in rhetoric and composition about the shifting landscape of media and composition for: 1) they can be instrumental in engaging students in conversations about the evolutionary nature of composition media; 2) these theories and their uptake, appropriation, and extension in composition classes in light of emerging composition technologies can help students see the relationship between old and new media or literacies in a new light; 3) their adoption in course materials and assignments can facilitate students’ learning of multiple literacies that they now require to successfully navigate the complexities of globalized world by involving them in the production and consumption of an array of old and new media compositions; and 4) such an interaction of students with media, if complemented by critical resources from rhetoric and media, can translate into their increased awareness of the rhetoricity of each medium and their roles as the citizens of media saturated world.

In order to demonstrate how the incorporation of these resources in composition can be productive, I will elaborate how I translated the tenets of remediation and media convergence into some meaningful curricular instruments such as remediation projects (where students remediated their academic essays into web forms for two different audiences—general American public, and communities of students’ peers who they closely worked with during the composition of those web texts), and collaborative documentary film-making projects; implemented them in two composition classrooms of diverse student body in an American institution, and achieved some designated pedagogical goals of cultivating multiple literacies in students while engaging them in composition practices in its larger sense. This being a part of a larger study, I will also discuss some of the findings of this experimentation (with a mutliliterate composition pedagogy) in a diverse classroom by triangulating different sources of data such as student artifacts, my curricular artifacts, students’ unit and portfolio reflections, scripts of interviews with fourteen of my twenty students (I interviewed them four times during the semeser—once for each of four units of the course), their blogs, and my own research narratives.

“Public Good” provision in copyright legislation is the most talked about aspect in copyright scholarship and most neglected one in actual legislations. Copyright experts claim that “public good” provision, i.e. the general public’s access to the artifacts of knowledge and information is much more crucial for the creation of informed citizenry and facilitation of public education and welfare than the educators’ conditional access to epistemological artifacts provided by the ‘fair use’ provisions of existing copyright legislations. Existing copyright legislations, they argue, are the tools of capitalists constructed for the control and pursuit of wealth. Driven by ideology of individualism and a romantic notion of authorship, existing copyright laws are gate-keeping knowledge and information at the interest of a few while depriving the general public (primarily the poor ones from developing and underdeveloped countries) of information, knowledge, and entertainment.

In short, while the experts and public are advocating for a porous, flexible, and liberal copyright code, the copyright holders are pressing constantly for more insular/stricter laws.

Against this complex scenario, I conducted a survey of “public good” provisions in the domestic copyright legislations of four different countries: the USA, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. My central question in the survey was whether the “public good” provisions vary across the countries by their development status, with the US as a developed country and the other three as developing ones. The Berne Convention and other international treaties on copyright provide little space exclusively for developing and underdeveloped countries to include the clauses related to “public good” in their copyright legislations while the same privilege in a way is denied to developed countries. Have the developing/underdeveloped countries taken advantage of that provision and therefore have more “public good” provisions compared to the developed ones?

To determine the degree of “public good” across legislations, in my presentation,  I look at certain sections of the legislations like “Terms of Copyright”, “Fair Use” or “Limitations and Exceptions”, “Scope of Copyright”, “Offences and Penalties” and “Works Protected” where legislators could potentially allow general public access to artifacts of knowledge and information, thereby facilitating/generating “public good”. The more flexible these provisions, the more access of general public to knowledge and information and therefore more “public good”. Grounding my survey against a small corpus of recent scholarship on copyright that calls for free flow of information and public good provisions in legislations, I examine relevant legislations of all four countries in relation to one another. My study indicates that “public good” is the most ignored aspect in copyright legislations of all four countries irrespective of their development status. The differences in the provisions –be it copyright term or fair use—across countries are very negligible. In fact, none of the developing countries utilizes the space for “public good” provided by Berne Convention and other international treaties. Though Nepal and Sri Lanka have little flexible provisions which could promote “public good” to some extent, copyright legislations of these countries, in fact, are not much different from that of the USA. Computer software protection in India, for instance, is stricter than that even in the USA. Overall, the copyright laws in all four countries, as claimed by the copyright experts, appear to be the mechanisms instituted for gate-keeping knowledge and information. They are the constructs of those whose works have already been published or of corporate giants who have taken control of publication industries and want to make money by limiting public access to knowledge works and information.

Possibilities, Pluralities, and Preparations: Pursuit of Pedagogies for Globalized Classrooms

Demographic shift in US composition classrooms challenges the traditional pedagogies and calls for innovative pedagogies that are open to diversity and difference in terms of cultures, languages, literacy traditions, and habits of thoughts (of diverse student bodies). An effective pedagogy for the globalized classroom should transcend  the traditional monolinguistic and monocultural assumptions (Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Matsuda, 2006; Canagarajah, 2006) and scaffold students’ plural literacies, while cultivating in them the composition and communication skills necessary to navigate the challenges of globalized world. This could involve remaining open to creative possibilities by expanding the boundaries of heuristics, writing style, composition media and technologies, and source use (Ulmer, 1994; New London Group,1996; Kachru, 2008).

In this context, this panel will explore and propose some potential pedagogies for the culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms in US higher education in order to make writing instruction and courses relevant to real-life situations and to cater to the needs and interests of diverse student body.

Speaker 1: Forging Interdisciplinary Alliance for Engaging Composition in its Expanded Sense

Speaker 1 calls for a new interdisciplinary alliance among some intersecting scholarly fields, such as media/new media, intercultural communication, World Englishes, literacy studies, globalization, and rhetoric and composition in order to engage composition in its broader sense. He attempts to delineate how each of these fields shares important insights with the other and how each one informs and contributes in important ways to the exploration of an effective pedagogy for the composition classrooms with diverse student body. Speaker 1 maintains that a pedagogy and curriculum built on germane insights and resources from these aligned fields can facilitate students’ learning of multiple literacies, their engagement with expanded notion of composition, and their interactions with real-life communication and composition challenges. For example, the notions of remediation (Grusin and Bolter), and media convergence (Jenkins) from media studies can speak to the changing face of media, communication, and literacy including composition or writing. Similarly, the theory of multiliteracy (New London Group) from literacy studies can help expand the boundary of composition by highlighting the availability of multiple modes and modalities of composition. Along similar lines, globalization, World Englishes, and intercultural communication can contribute to enlarge the boundary of composition both conceptually and pragmatically. Scholarship in World Englishes points toward plural writing styles and communication conventions (Yamuna Kachru) across cultures, which become pertinent to diverse composition classrooms in the US, the sites for intercultural communication requiring each of our students and us, what Chen and Starosta call, an intercultural competence that is necessary not only for transnational interactions but also for cross-cultural or cross-ethnic interactions. In addition to this theorizing venture, speaker 1 also discusses and analyzes the findings of a study he conducted in a sophomore level composition class at a research university in the Spring of 2012, where he implemented a course (“Multiliteracies in Motion”) and pedagogy (“Multiliterate Composition Pedagogy”) built around the resources drawn from the above mentioned fields of scholarship.  

Speaker 2:  Understanding Asian Writing Patterns in US First-Year Composition Classes  

Speaker 2 argues that multicultural students’ presence challenged the writing program’s exclusive focus on native-English speakers and called for a more global focus on pedagogy (Canagarajah, 2006; Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Matsuda, 2006). Recent statistics released by the Institute of International Education indicate a rise in the number of international students at American universities; however, very little attention has been given to this subject, and many universities also lack writing instruction resources. Based on his research and teaching experience in diverse cultures and diverse academic institutions, Speaker 2 will discuss how writing, rhetoric, and communication function in Asian cultures, and he will stress on how monolingual instructors should understand other writing patterns, writing rhetorical moves, and geopolitical-based rhetorical situations so that they can facilitate various writing strategies in the first-year composition classes.

Speaker 2 will discuss some Asian writing and communication patterns, such as collective vs individualistic, direct vs indirect culture, low power context vs high power context, and AB/BC vs. AB/CD syntactic strategies, etc. (Connor, 1996, 2008; Limbu, McCool, & Zeng, 2013; Sadri & Flammia, 2011; Thatcher, 2010). He will stress how these intercultural elements construct student’s writing processes, and how Asian students and (monolingual) US instructors confront challenges in US writing classes. Speaker 2 will further focus on how the use of digital technologies assist diverse student populations to network with other students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to channel their writing and communication processes.  Finally, Speaker 2 will discuss why we should create new writing research methodologies and design newer representational writing instructions, why US universities should change their policies, why and how they should train/hire to meet the needs and expectations of diverse student body.

Speaker 3: The Creative of the Critical: Keeping Composition Open to Uncertainties

Speaker 3 will maintain that the current, arguably prescriptive writing pedagogy—with an emphasis on structure, organization, thesis statement, claim and warrants, and the like—underestimates the value of invention and creativity, at the level of both content and prose, that happens outside ordered and systematic, consciously structured paradigms. Combining Geoffrey Sirc’s theory of composition as happening with Gregory Ulmer’s idea of chora as a space for invention in new media, he will contend that current composition classrooms with multicultural/multilingual students, equipped with new media, call for a more open approach to exploit their creative possibilities.

The existing modes of invention, to begin with, put an excessive emphasis on structured methods that are based on traditional notion of topoi, which, Jeff Rice argues, “served print-based writing instruction by allowing students (and often instructors) the ability to work from a common repository of ideas” (p. 33). As a result, “writers often face obstacles regarding how they engage language innovatively, how they fashion new ways of expression, or even how they adjust to formats and structures that don’t accommodate topoi well” (Rice, 2007). This implicates that the traditional modes of invention like Burke’s pentad and Young, Becker and Pike’s tagmemics are at the least insufficient and too constraining. Similarly, an excessive emphasis on other formal structures like the placement of thesis statement and the so-called language of the university can become detrimental to creative possibilities by not allowing students to explore and experiment outside those rigid structures (Sirc, 2002; Mcrorie, 1970). It particularly concerns the classrooms that accommodate students with diverse cultures and different habits of mind. This speaker will make a case for remaining open to uncertainty in the composing process in a globalized classroom for a more creative practice of composition.

I have evolved as a teacher over time, and so has my teaching philosophy. In my earlier years as a teacher, I was a fan of collaborative and critical pedagogies in the classroom in conjunction with other relevant activities. I loved collaborative approach because of my belief that learning is collaborative, that students learn more from interaction and conversation among themselves than from lecture, that students get broader knowledge, experience and insights while engaged in group work and research, that knowledge is negotiated “shared belief,” and that learning and knowledge thus obtained are enduring and meaningful. Therefore, I often encouraged small-group discussion, peer-review workshop, individual and collaborative writing assignments, group work, collaborative research projects and presentations in and out of the class. My assumption then was that such academic activities can act as springboards for discovery, revelation, reinforcement and feedback. I also firmly believed that collaborative approach could facilitate the conversation among multiple views, including the views of minoritized groups, making the range of knowledge broad and writing and research rich.

In conjunction with collaborative pedagogy, I also preferred to use critical pedagogy in the classroom with the belief that it is the teacher’s responsibility to create and maintain informed and thinking student body capable of critiquing, questioning and resisting, if need be, anything taught to or imposed on them. My choice was guided by my conviction that as a teacher I should alert students of possible manipulation, exploitation and indoctrination by some set of dominant ideologies and dogmas, and try to make them the informed and critical readers and writers. This being a broader objective, in my class, students examined, discussed, debated, contested, and scrutinized the ideologies causing disparities and inequalities among the classes and groups in the society. Thus, in an attempt to “empower citizens (students) to disrupt dominant ideology and to revitalize democratic practice”, I relied on critical, literary, linguistic and cultural theories, theories of logic, and critical thinking tools to inculcate critical and analytical perspectives in students. As part of the assignment and classroom activity, my students learned to analyze and critique a variety of texts, such as the commercial ads, newspaper articles, books, film clips, and so on.

But now getting through doctoral training and years of teaching in a variety of settings in the US, and abroad, my teaching philosophy has evolved and taken a slightly different turn. I still use collaborative and critical pedagogies but in combination with other sets of pedagogies and practices. As opposed to being the major pedagogical instruments in my earlier years, the critical and collaborative pedagogies now surface into my teaching as critical and collaborative literacies, along side other kinds of literacies such as multimodal and intercultural. No question, I still regard them as vital, but not as the only sets of skills students need to learn to successfully navigate the complexities of the globalized world. In that sense, in past few years of my growth as a teacher, critical and collaborative approaches have experienced positional shifts—from privileged ones to equitable to other approaches/literacies. This shift in my pedagogical and curricular design is emblematic of my altered perspective on the end of education, literacy or teaching itself. I now firmly believe that our students need to learn a lot more than just the critical and collaborative skills in order to wrestle with the communication, composition and interactive challenges of the 21st century world. They (as well as we) need to be multiliterate now because “[G]lobalization provides a contextual necessity for us to become multiliterate” (Bull and Anstey). In other words, everyone of us now should have the ability to interact using multiple Englishes in English speaking context, multiple writing/communication styles across cultures and disciplines as well as the ability to communicate using an array of visual, audio, and textual resources in multiple new and old media including print, digital and cyber technologies. In addition, we should have the ability to critically evaluate information and resources, and use them ethically across contexts. In short, we all should gain or have a rich repertoire of creative, critical, reflective and rhetorical skills in order to successfully navigate the complexities of this interwoven world.

In line with my current teaching philosophy, in the Spring of 2012, I framed a course around the idea of multiliteracies, and divided my course into 4 units, each focused on different set of literacies. The first unit in my course was dedicated to learning from students about their literacy traditions (literacy narrative assignment), and cultivating critical and visual literacies (rhetorical analysis of digital artifact project) whereas second unit was devoted to engaging essayistic literacy (argument essay assignment). The following unit (unit 3) was meant to introduce students to the notion of remediation with some hands-on training with “repurposing” media (remediation projects). In this particular unit, students were asked to remediate their unit 2 print-based argument essays into website forms. They actually produced two versions of the website in response to my assignment, which asked them to gear one version towards the general American public while the other one towards the community of the student’s peer. For this assignment, students worked for three weeks closely in a group of two, and I tried to pair students from somewhat different backgrounds into a group so that they could interact with one another and tailor their remediated websites to the expectations and the values of the community of his/her peer. Students were asked to design the general website first, share that with their peers and only then redesign the first version of website based on their peers’ feedback. This particular project was intended to put students to work with multiple media or modalities, introduce them to convergence culture and make them cognizant of the rhetoricity of different media (e.g. website vs. print) or the dynamics of intercultural/interracial communication. Unit four was dedicated to documentary production (collaborative documentary film-making project), where students in groups of three collaborated to produce a movie on controversial contemporary topics like Occupy Wall Street or the Trayvon Martin (shooting) case or the Democratic Movement in the Middle East. This unit encouraged students to work in collaboration with each other (Global literacy); work with multiple media (multimodal literacy); learn multiple digital skills such as camera work, editing, script writing (digital literacy) and presentation skills (they presented the projects to the class).

This sequence of assignments was done on the basis of some simple organizing principles. The first had to do with the transition of students from passive consumers of media and knowledge to critical and reflective consumers, and producers of those entities. The rhetorical analysis assignment, which asked students to critically and rhetorically analyze the chosen digital artifacts, aimed to make them the critical and reflective users of media or knowledge, while the argument essay assignment shifted the focus from consumption towards production of knowledge. The argument essay assignment was transitional in that it required both critical consumption (careful evaluation of sources for use in the essay) and production of knowledge (claim-making or argument/s). But remediation and documentary filmmaking were full-fledged media or knowledge production assignments also because both versions of remediation, and collaboratively produced documentaries were hosted publicly on different Web 2.0 interfaces. The other organizing motif was the idea of multiple literacies (a multiliterate composition pedagogy, in my formulation). Each unit was dedicated to some set of literacies that we in rhetoric and composition value such as critical, visual and media (unit 1), essayistic and information (unit 2), multimedia and intercultural (unit 3), and multimodal (unit 4). Thus, within the designated course objectives, I built in assignments and activities in the interest of scaffolding and cultivating multiple literacies in students, and preparing them for undertaking challenges of surviving in a complexly interconnected world.

I plan to present the findings of a research I conducted examining the genre features of and stylistic variations in grants proposal writing in Nepal and the USA and analyzing how or whether those variations reflect the socio-cultural imprints and/or communicative/discourse conventions of practitioners/technical writers in the regions.

This case study presentation will build on and extend the ongoing disciplinary conversation about the indispensability of intercultural technical communication in the era of economic, political, cultural and technological globalization. Recent scholarship in intercultural technical communication is echoing the inevitability of technical communication across borders. For instance,   Dragga Sam claims that “today’s technical communicator…is often a multicultural, intercultural communicator engaging issues of translation, interpretation, and localization,”  but regrets that so “little research or guidance is available [for Technical Communicator] to identify the practices of ethical intercultural technical communication.”  Similarly, Doreen Starke-Meyerring, Ann Hill Duin, and Talene Palvetzian contend that “technical communication (TC) in both the workplace and higher education is undergoing powerful change as a result of globalization.” And Jan M Ulijn and Kirk St. Amant state that “if professional communicators wish to achieve effective intercultural communication, they first need to understand how these cultural factors can affect professional interactions.” These scholars among many others are pointing at the fact that technical communication now is transborder phenomenon increasingly informed by the forces of globalization. Therefore, more research into more genres of technical writing/communication across cultures, borders and spaces is absolutely necessary in order to provide technical communicator with resources to turn to in case s/he faces challenge of communicating effectively and successfully in changed working environment. My presentation  tries to respond to that need (or call) and contribute to build up such a much needed research corpus. As Sam also highlights, my presentation takes into consideration the fact that the existing research corpus on intercultural technical genres and practices is mostly about major/popular genres (of TC) like e-mail or memo and dominant cultures like Chinese and American therefore not adequate to prepare the technical communicators to go to global market place.

Contextualizing my case study with a brief literature review on intercultural technical communication, I will closely look at and analyze the genre and stylistic features of a small sample of grants proposal writing from Nepal and the USA. After observing and highlighting the genre or stylistic variations or uniformity, I will dwell on the major question: what underlie the variations or similarities in them? Is it cultural/ discursive conventions or socio-economic factors or something else?  And potential implications of the findings for curriculum design and pedagogical approaches to technical communication both in Nepal and the USA will wrap up my presentation.

I will discuss the ways in which World Englishes can broaden the curriculum of graduate programs by creating space for different varieties of English that students from across cultures and nations bring to the increasingly globalized classroom. Only a curriculum informed by transnational and cross-cultural perspectives on language may begin to help the field recognize/legitimize different discourse conventions and expression patterns, as well as composition styles that international students draw from in their composition practices. Such an approach is important to develop a transnational perspective “capable of understanding the study and teaching of written English in relation to other languages and to the dynamics of globalization” (Bruce and Horner 623). Finally, I contend that since existing graduate programs do not place adequate emphases on global and cross-linguistic issues of composition, it is imperative that their curricular and programmatic priorities be required to make them relevant to the times and also bring about changes in undergraduate composition pedagogy since graduate programs are the ones that ultimately shape undergraduate composition pedagogy.

The American classroom has a character all its own—and is possibly very different from what you have encountered in your home countries.  I will speak to you about some of my experiences working in the American classroom. Complemented by some videos, I will take this discussion as an opening onto a conversation on how expectations are challenged, and teaching practices adapted for this particular academic setting.

Writing instruction scenario across borders is complex and variegated. That is the case precisely because as Alan C. Purves (1988) contends, “people learn to write in schools or through some sort of instruction” (p.13) and as Anneli Vahapassi (1988) claims, writing “instruction differences do exist” (p. 62) across borders. For instance, in British and Scottish schools, writing is taught and done to learn and to inform (p. 63) while in India, “[C]omposition is taught in schools, and… the college level, but these contain grammatical descriptions, instructions, and illustrations of parsing, a few remarks on organizing narrative, descriptive, argumentative, and personal essays” (Kachru, p. 111) and in Germany, “[S]tudents in upper-level courses are given writing assignments intended to help them develop a deeper understanding of course materials and to examine authors’ ideas criti¬cally and independently” (Reichelt, p. 94). Instructional differences across borders also manifest in the medium used in teaching and institutional and discursive location of writing.

Against this rich global writing instruction scenario, I will discuss the following questions in my presentation:

1. How and to what extent does writing instruction across borders vary?

2. Can writing variations across cultures and spaces be explained by instructional variations?

3. What does the instructional variation across borders say about the writing preparation of our students in a globalized American composition classroom?

4. What adjustments and/or modifications should we make to our existing curricula, pedagogical approaches and instructional/composition media to cater to the needs of such a globalized classroom and student body?

References

Kachru, Yamuna (1988). Writers in Hindi and English. In Alan C. Purves (Ed.), Writing

Across Languages and Cultures: Issues in Contrastive Rhetoric, (pp. 109-137). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Purves, Alan C (2008). Writing Across Languages and Cultures: Issues in Contrastive

Rhetoric. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Reichelt, Melinda (2005). WAC Practices at the Secondary Level in Germany. A

National Journal for Writing Across the Curriculum. 16, 89-100.

Vahapassi, Anneli (1988). The Problems of Selection of Writing Tasks in Cross-Cultural

Study. In Alan C. Purves (Ed.), Writing Across Languages and Cultures: Issues in Contrastive Rhetoric, (pp. 51-79). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.