Teaching Multiwriting

Researching and Composing with Multiple Genres, Media, Disciplines, and Cultures

Robert L. Davis and Mark F. Shadle

paper, 0-8093-2754-6, $35.00s
978-0-8093-2754-6
272 pages, 6 x 9, 16 illus.
Rhetoric/Composition

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Reinventing and revitalizing composition studies with multi-genre writing

Formulaic ways to train students in composition and rhetoric are no longer effective, say authors Robert L. Davis and Mark F. Shadle. Scholar-teachers must instead reinvent the field from the inside. TeachingMultiwriting: ResearchingandComposingwithMultiple Genres, Media,Disciplines,andCultures presents just such a reinvention with multiwriting, an alternative, open approach to composing that spans genres, media, disciplines, and cultures. The authors argue for supplanting the outdated research paper assignment with research projects that use multiple forms to explore questions that cannot be fully answered, seeking to open the minds of both authors and readers to new understandings.

Multiwriting remains tied to the traditions of composition, rhetoric, and discourse studies but encourages students to link personal and academic passions, say the authors. They assert that this composition approach promotes lifelong learning by putting questions at the center of the student experience, thus giving students choices about how to research, write, and present their discourses in relation to their subjects, purposes, audiences, and occasions.

TeachingMultiwriting illustrates how multiwriting supports freedom, innovation, and connection of content and form. Projects might have visual, aural, cinematic, or architectural components and can come in such forms as CDs, PowerPoint presentations, poems, and posters.

This innovative volume, which is geared to composition teachers at all levels, includes sixteen helpful illustrations and provides classroom exercises and projects for each chapter.

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“Teaching Multiwriting is a fantastic book; it’s timely, energetic, hip, nicely researched, and inventive. Davis and Shadle offer pragmatic and inspiring advice, as well as a contextual basis for pedagogical change. I will make this a required book the next time I teach an undergraduate or graduate course in composition theory.”

—Derek Owens, author of Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation

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Robert L. Davis is the director of undergraduate writing and a professor of English–writing at Eastern Oregon University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, including an online multigenre textbook coauthored with Mark Shadle.

Mark F. Shadle is a professor of English–writing at Eastern Oregon University. In addition to publishing his work in journals and books, he presents workshops with coauthor Robert Davis on multiwriting and alternative composition methods.