PWR at CU Boulder

online writing environments do not magically produce better student writing — or better teaching practices — but can allow for practice with different composing and teaching skills, which can lead to better writing, teaching, and administering depending on the form (for example awareness of audio, visual, and design considerations).

One of the biggest pedagogical effects this approach has had on my teaching is to allow my classroom to become, more than ever, a real artistic writing studio

But this is where the ubiquitous collaborative pedagogy espoused and practiced by writing teachers everywhere helps. Since so much of what we do in my writing classes involves students helping students — as well as themselves — take more responsibility for each other’s writing processes,

None of these students had created a video composition before. And yet, using archival footage from Rauner and on-campus interviews, these first-time filmmakers produced a moving short film about student activism and apathy. As you watch the film, note that the filmmakers’ choices (of image, interviews, music, and transitions) are very clearly rooted in an awareness of the effect that they hoped to have on their audience.

  One might argue—and argue correctly—that teaching students an awareness of audience does not require that we study or assign multimedia compositions. But students are deeply engaged with these media, often relying on them to make very important life decisions, like whom to vote for in the next presidential election and why. This engagement leads students to feel that multimedia compositions matter, and that these compositions have a power that other compositions don’t have—perhaps because they believe multimedia compositions have a broad and genuinely interested audience are therefore more likely to be seen.

Indeed, a group of students working on a short film reported to me that they had spent an hour heatedly arguing about a single transition in their film. These were students who often overlooked transitions in their written work.