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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
First Advisor
Adrienne Jankens
Abstract
This dissertation project began with the development of a Design-Focused Approach (DFA) to First-Year Composition (FYC) curriculum largely informed by multimodal pedagogical theory. In the DFA to FYC curriculum, I highlighted the importance of multiliteracy and the demand for multiple modalities for students to effectively communicate in various contexts. Based upon the qualitative data that I collected during the course, via student writing samples and research interviews, I have determined that writing framed as designing allows for students to engage their audiences in a multisensory experience that strengthens their artifact’s situatedness, responsiveness and reflects the students’ identities. Artifacts designed through these means can inform and impact contexts outside the university setting; thus, giving student designers the agency they need to strengthen connections between learning spaces and those they will assume as professionals and citizens. Based on a multimodal theory of writing and design-thinking, the curriculum uniquely positions students to think critically about how to participate in such discourse. The DFA to FYC supports students in a recursive and thoughtful process for generating innovative solutions to problems through meaningful projects. Moreover, a general education composition course (FYC), designed to do this work, reframes university learning outcomes for 21st century literacies. To make the DFA to FYC curriculum and my subsequent findings meaningful, I chose to create a website, Designing.FYC.com, for writing instructors interested in implementing multimodal pedagogy in their own classrooms. Using a comparable mixed-methods approach found in the 2017 Kairos web text, “On Multimodal Composing,” by Alvarez et.al., I first began to document what happened in the DFA to FYC course, then secondly captured my design process during the development of the actual website. I recorded think aloud protocols based on the methodology of Flower and Hayes’s as described in “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” DesignFYC.com contributes to the field of composition studies as it fills a gap for available instructional resources focused on actualizing students’ multimodal praxis. Most notably, the development of the website chronicled through a series of blog posts performs the theoretical work I endorse in the DFA.
Recommended Citation
Morris, Kristi L., "A Design-Focused Approach To First-Year Composition: A Mixed Method Student-Centered Study Of Multimodality" (2024). Wayne State University Dissertations. 4026.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/4026
