Discourses Surrounding Multimodal Media in the First-Year Composition Classrooms

Abstract

This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore ideologies on multimodal media in first-year composition courses compared to multimedia composition practices in the workplace. In doing so, it highlights intersecting discourses at play, with the beliefs about acceptable or common writing products that parallel the writing students will do in other courses while adhering to grammatical correctness and firm essay structures being central in impacting the roles of multimodal media in the classroom. This article seeks to understand how discourses on multimedia composition within the teacher-professional continuum (TPC) on the topics students should write about, such as argumentative subjects or personal writings, limit the effectiveness of multimedia and digitalization often becomes an additional process to represent these topics instead of a method to perform the complex relationships that writings create with specific contexts. To better understand how this discourse impacts the composition process of multimodal media in the classroom, three first-year composition syllabi are analyzed through content analysis to learn how these discourses cause multimodal media to digitize these two topics and how comprehending multimodal media within this limited lens may differ slightly than the multimedia composition process in the workplace. The results of this analysis explicate how academic discourses limit the communicative abilities of multimodal media while portraying it as a technological process instead of a complex rhetorical one.