Writing about Writing: The Author's Statement as Reflection

For the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the fabulous Dawnene Hassett to teach a version of the multiliteracies unit I designed previously for my Teaching ELA course. This unit—as scary and overwhelming as it originally felt—has turned out to be one of the most impactful instructional designs I’ve undertaken. Its legs have carried it to professional conferences (WEMTA and WCTE), a professional learning day at a local school district, and as various workshops in other university courses on campus. The basic gist of the project is to engage preservice teachers with multimodal composition by posing open-ended opportunities for them to design digital projects in response to choice reading.

The original version includes the design of four projects (a traditional essay, infographic, podcast, and digital story) which expose teachers to the varied nature of the writing process within each of those contexts. We use the work of Troy Hicks (Crafting Digital Writing and Assessing Digital Writing) to guide how we attend to author’s craft, elements of multimodality, and the intentionality of our design choices. While students often begin from a place of frustration and confusion, because it turns out they are NOT digital natives afterall, they ultimately find themselves impressed and excited by their final products. And the “stickiness” of the experience has been vital to encouraging transfer to practice, something that can be especially challenging with digital projects.

This time around I decided to follow-up on a recent inclination to think more strategically about how to write about writing. While this piece is usually something I have addressed only through conversation, I’ve begun to think that articulating these perspectives is an essential piece of synthesizing the varied knowledge and practices informing each individual’s writing process and as a culminating reflection that ties the experience together in a way that may aid in transferring the process to practice. Afterall, while I jump for joy to see student teachers even attempting these types of digital projects at their sites, I am more interested in the ways they scaffold and bring awareness to the thinking that goes into the production process.
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Enter the Author’s Statement. Borrowed from the popular usage of artist statements, I envisioned this as a complementary reflection that would illuminate the experience of production and intentionality behind each writer’s design(s). For our first venture, I’ve limited the prompt to the following:

• Attending to Author’s Craft: Use the handout from Troy Hicks (excerpts from his book, Digital Writing Workshop) that highlights different elements of author’s craft you might have highlighted in designing your project. This is not exhaustive– you won’t consider ALL of the elements. Just focus on those that seemed most meaningful to your writing process.
• Elements of Multimodality: Here you might be thinking more about how you have made intentional choices related to  visual (print, image, movement, etc.) and auditory (music, narration, sound effects, etc.) elements. The relationship between these elements will vary based on the medium in which you created your project. They will also depend on the overall goals and direction you had for your project.
• Navigating the Process: Finally, you might also consider the choices you made to troubleshoot or problem solve within the digital spaces you worked. How did these choices impact your final design– either by enhancing or limiting your design process?

Dawnene has suggested that students post their statements to their final Weebly pages, and I cannot wait to see what they have to say! Their final projects will be posted to our Digital Salon which houses a variety of mentor texts (all created by preservice teachers) that might serve as springboards for digital writing projects in any number of future classrooms.