Episode 12: Video Didn't Kill the Composition Student

Composition classes are getting increasingly multimodal. You can't avoid it--and why would you want to? Visuals, sounds, videos--all are modes of composing that match up with the rhetorical principles we use when teaching alphabetic writing.

In this episode, co-edited with John Silvestro of Miami University, we focus on the practicalities of assigning video projects to your students. First, John interviews Jason Palmeri, director of First-Year Composition at Miami University and author of _Remixing Composition_. Then, John and Kyle chat about an all-text kind of video assignment (??!!). Finally, we'll hear from Crystal VanKooten of Oakland University for an overview of scholarship on video in the composition classroom.

How can composition instructors use video in the classroom? Even if they're scared?
Plugs, Play, Pedagogy

Episode 12: Video Didn't Kill the Composition Student

Transcript available as a Google Doc here; check it out for more links, and feel free to comment on anything that needs comments.

Produced and recorded by Kyle Stedman ([email protected]; @kstedman), assistant professor of English at Rockford University, in cooperation with KairosCast and Writing Commons.

This episode is co-edited with John Silvestro from Miami University, @j_silvestro, [email protected].

Part 1: Interview with Jason Palmeri

Jason Palmeri, @jasonpalmeri, is associate professor of English and Director of Composition at Miami University and author of Remixing Composition.

Jason and John chat about how Jason got into teaching video, some of his assignments, and some of the theories that undergird his practice. Plus, they're both nice and fun.

Part 2: Scripting Our Way to Video

Next, John and Kyle talk about John's assignment of having students write scripts for movies that they don't actually produce. You'll hear two examples of those written scripts read aloud for the show by John and Sally Neidhard. And we talk about how kind of weird that is; Sergei Eisenstein is invoked.

See the show transcript for lots of links and for the exact scripts the students wrote.

Part 3: Crystal's Review of Video Scholarship

Finally, Crystal VanKooten, assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Oakland University (@crystalvk), discusses some fundamental scholarship on video and composition. Including:

Sarah Arroyo, Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy
Jody Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole
Bump Halbritter, Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers
Stuart Selber, Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

Resources

Jason mentions Michael Wesch's work on YouTube.
John mentions Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" and Tony Zhou’s “Every Frame a Painting” series, including "F for Fake (1973) - How to Structure a Video Essay"
The Internet Movie Script Database
celtx (tools for scripting/planning movies)

End Matter

The show is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Two sound effects were from freesound.org:

alex8valdes, "Strange T.V. sound"
Ohrwurm, “Working with shovel.wav"

All the music is freely available at OverClocked ReMix:

Big Giant Circles and some1namedjeff, “Thunderstruck”
Mazedude, “Torvus Chips”
Hylian Lemon, “Essence of Lime"
Disco Dan, "Blue Lightning"