By Ibuki Nishino
ENC 1136: Multimodal Writing & Digital Literacy (Fall 2021)
Instructor: Alexander Slotkin
This course explores how writing as a rhetorical meaning-making process occurs at the intersection of multimodality and digital literacy, which we defined as literacy in relation to electronics and/or “our fingers, our digits” (Haas 84). Students enrolled in this course composed a variety of multimodal texts across different digital spaces to create carefully crafted, creatively written, and well-researched textual projects. Fittingly for a journal called ImageTexT, the examples of student writing featured in this issue from my course—Matthew Lee’s “入れ墨,” Ibuki Nishino’s “Owarai Japan,” and Teresa Powell’s “Life in the Circus”—come from our Image/Text unit.
Having composed a traditional rhetorical analysis of a multimodal text, students were asked to rhetorically explore the multimodal and digital relationships between text, imagery, matter, and space by hand-crafting a zine (i.e., a self-published booklet) on a topic of their choice. Students were encouraged to draw on their bodily knowledge, everyday experiences, and/or cultural communities when choosing their topic as well as framing and explaining their work. In so doing, students put the analytical skills they honed from the previous writing assignment into practice while also centering the knowledge they bring into the classroom every day.
Ibuki Nishino
Ibuki Nishino is a sophomore exchange student from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. As part of the university’s School of Culture, Media, and Society, she majored in creative writing, maintaining a keen interest in Japanese poetry and media studies. Her favorite pastime is watching Japanese comedies.
Works Cited
Haas, Angela M. “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice.” Studies in American Indian Literature, vol. 19, no. 4, 2007, pp. 77-100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2008.0005