Open Society

We agree with McPherson’s contention that  “hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly imagination, [. . .] because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities” (2009, 121).

In turning to multimodal performance as a methodology of media history, we’ve been particularly influenced by Tara McPherson’s (2009) call for media studies scholars to engage in making and analyzing media as recursive, interanimating processes. We agree with McPherson’s contention that  “hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly imagination, [. . .] because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities” (2009, 121). In other words, multimodal composing is itself a way of knowing; scholars will come to understand the media archives we study in more nuanced, complex ways if we have experience making media as well as critiquing it.

The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production. [. . .] Indeed, terms like serious and rigorous [. . .] signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy. (Halberstam 2011, 6)

But Halberstam’s queer rejection of seriousness emboldens us to revel in the disruptive frivolity of multimodal play—to recognize that our conscious refusal of a serious tone in digital multimodal scholarship can potentially open new ways of knowing and being in the field.

This project is also informed by Halberstam’s elucidation of the value of engaging “silly archives” (Halberstam 2011, 2) that resist traditional academic hierarchies of knowledge. For example, Halberstam chose to turn a queer eye towards an archive of animated children’s films that “preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children” (3). We similarly seek to reclaim the “wondrous anarchy” of youth media production in English classrooms as a way to resist the norms of disciplinary seriousness that limit the kinds of multimodal texts that we and our students compose. In our experience, multimodal writing pedagogies have too often been dismissed by colleagues in the university as “childish,” and we advocates of multimodal pedagogy too often respond to these critiques by demonstrating the very serious reflective learning that takes place in our classrooms. But consider if we took a step back from defending the adult seriousness of multimodal composition and instead embraced a childish approach to multimodal production. How might embracing our inner twelve-year-old help us think beyond the academic professional norms that limit the transformative potential of multimodal scholarship? By consciously embracing a childish approach to media production, we ultimately seek to resist the institutional hierarchies that too often prevent university faculty from learning from and valuing the innovative, playful media pedagogies that can be found in K–12 contexts, both historic and contemporary.

But everything isn’t simply fun and games. On a more serious note, we also seek to employ multimodal composing as a strategy to vividly demonstrate how our archival research arises from a deeply embodied, “lived process” (Kirsch and Rohan 2008). While traditional print histories often erase the embodied positionalities of their authors by telling “authoritative” narratives that speak almost entirely in the third person, feminist historians have increasingly called scholars to account more fully for how our own embodied positionalities and experiences shape the work we do in archives (Kirsch and Rohan 2008; Royster and Kirsch, 2012). As Royster and Kirsch argue, a feminist rhetorical methodology necessitates that scholars break with the third-person conventions of historical narrative structure to tell stories about how their inquiries have been influenced by their own “lived, embodied experience(s)” (22) both within the archives and beyond them.

As you watch and listen to us discuss the archive in our audio and video pieces, you can be reminded that our own selection and representation of this archive is necessarily influenced by how our own embodied positionalities influence our work as historians. We are both white, tenured English professors who live and work in Ohio, but grew up in the southern United States. We both share a love of silly humor, obscure old technologies, all things rhetoric, and classic cocktails. Jason is a queer, genderfluid person from a middle class background, who lives with an adorable cat named The General; Jason also lives with the unpredictability of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Ben identifies as a cishet man, as well as a first-generation academic from a rural, working-class background. While we have worked hard to re-see our archives through many different methodological lenses, we recognize well that the story we tell here is very much shaped by our own lived experiences. It’s likely that other scholars would have arrived at very different narratives about the history of new media pedagogy, and we hope this book inspires them to tell those stories.

We also see multimodal composing as a way to reveal some of the embodied process of our “dialogic collaboration” (Lunsford and Ede 1990) as scholars. As Lunsford and Ede have long argued, the process of collaborative writing need not proceed by strictly dividing up work, where each author is solely responsible for their own part. Rather, in a dialogic collaboration, authors engage in dialogue with each other throughout the process from the very earliest stages of invention to the very final stylistic edits, such that it becomes impossible to clearly identify where one author’s contribution begins and the other’s ends. Importantly, Ede and Lunsford emphasize dialogic collaboration as a robustly multimodal process in which spoken conversation plays a key role: “If you can imagine the words talk . . .  write . . . talk . . . read . . . talk . . . write . . . talk . . . read . . . written in a large looping spiral—that comes closest a description as we know it” (Ede and Lunsford 1983, 152). Our process has been much the same, though we might sometimes replace the word “write” with other verbs such as “compose” or “code” or “perform.” Importantly, Lunsford and Ede argued that collaborative scholars should make space in their work to document their modes of composing, and they practiced this by telling detailed and engaging stories of the conversations they’ve had and the places they’ve gathered over years of “writing together” (Lunsford and Ede 2012).

One of the most important things which adults and young people tell me about is the process of working out how to make a situation work for them.  It’s a process of knowing yourself and how you work best, and then finding the flexibilities in your environment which you can use.

The more flexible an environment is, the more possible this becomes.   The better a person knows themselves, the more they can do it. As they practice, they are able to see the possibilities, to work out where the flex is – and therefore, the better they can find a way to do the things which are important to them.

They find the flex, and often they feel bad about it.  Other adults tell them that they are spoiling their child, or coddling them, and they’ll never learn to cope if someone is always there to help.  They say that they are avoiding, and they’ll get more anxious as result. We see conforming to the expectations of the environment as something to aim for.  We think that the environment should be rigid and the child flexible, and we blame them if they aren’t.

‘Does it have to be this way?’ ‘Why?’

Our children can learn to find the flex, but only if we make it possible for them.  It’s a skill which needs practice. Just as parents learn how to do it when their children require it, children learn by seeing that it’s possible.  They can’t do it if there’s no potential for change.  They can’t do it if their only option is to fit in.

They learn when we give them lots of opportunities to be in flexible environments, where they can make decisions which matter.  Lots of chances to say no, and then to dip a toe in and say ‘maybe yes’.  Lots of opportunities to sit on the side lines until they want to join in (or decide it’s not for them).  And places where knowing that you need a break is valued just as much as driving yourself on.  Knowing themselves is the most valuable gift we can give our children. Knowing their strengths and what makes them tick, and knowing how to see the flex in a situation.   Finding the ways in which it will work for them, and feeling good about doing so.

Our children won’t thrive because they have learnt to fit in.  They’ll flourish because they have learnt not to.