Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) THE IDEA OF A MULTILITERACY CENTER: SIX RESPONSES

Valerie Balester Sohui Lee Texas A&M University Stanford University [email protected] [email protected]

Nancy Grimm David M. Sheridan Michigan Tech University Michigan State University [email protected] [email protected]

Jackie Grutsch McKinney Naomi Silver Ball State University University of Michigan [email protected] [email protected]

This essay—which began its life as a roundtable at Writing Center was renamed the Michigan Tech the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference— Multiliteracy Center to better reflect their practices. juxtaposes six responses from different administrators Sohui Lee explores the question of how tutor training and faculty engaged in the turn towards multiliteracy at her center might be adjusted to effectively engage centers. Although our title invokes Stephen North’s undergraduate tutors in “multimodal thinking” 1984 essay in which he tried to assert an identity for through situated practice. Valerie Balester discusses the “new” writing center, ours is influenced in how a move to -in-the-disciplines at approach more by North’s 1994 follow-up article her institution provided an opportunity to build a “Revisiting The Idea of the Writing Center” and Beth multiliteracy center with a focus on new media. Naomi Boquet and Neal Lerner’s explication of the influence Silver advocates that writing centers play a role in of North’s work in writing center studies. North’s teaching new media writing via course offerings as well reconsideration critiques his overly “romantic as tutor training and faculty outreach. idealization” of writing centers and moves from global Boquet and Lerner suggest that the lesson to take axioms to local action (10). Likewise, within this essay, from North and the cult-like (yet perhaps suffocating) the six authors grapple with local contexts and offer success of his 1984 essay is that the field’s status local solutions; none have tried to “romanticize” the “cannot be grounded in the words of one theorist, difficult trade-offs involved in the changing identities from one article, from one line; instead, it is of writing centers, and still none have dismissed the represented in richly textured accounts that are idea outright because it isn’t convenient. concerned with the full scope of studies, as While the authors’ experiences are varied, each befits the richness and complexity of writing center response demonstrates a sense of responsibility on the sites and the people who populate them” (185). To part of writing centers to forge ahead within their that end, the following accounts do not try to cohere institutional contexts toward a vision of multiliteracies to a common, seamless argument. At points, the that promotes access, awareness, connection, and various authors converge and diverge, agree and currency. David Sheridan compares two models of disagree, resulting in an essay that we hope gets at the multiliteracy centers in order to map anxieties that “richly textured accounts” that Boquet and Lerner writing centers tend to experience as they broaden promote while engaging the key question of how their missions to include multimodal compositions. writing centers can best address multiliteracies. Jackie Grutsch McKinney wonders if writing centers ought to call themselves multiliteracy centers. Nancy Grimm recounts the reactions as Michigan Tech’s Multiliteracy Center • 2 “You Have Made Me Very Angry!”: Humanities. At the LMC, we provide just-in-time peer Mapping Writing Center Anxieties about support for a wide range of media, including digital video, web compositions, desktop publishing, and Multiliteracies more. David M. Sheridan I think it's productive to read these two kinds of In 2002, I was working with colleagues at multiliteracy centers against each other. On the one University of Michigan’s Sweetland Writing Center to hand, we have multiliteracy centers (like the SMC) that establish something that we called the “Sweetland begin with the writing center model. On the other Multiliteracy Center" (SMC). Just as students had hand, we have multiliteracy centers (like the LMC) that historically come to the Sweetland Writing Center to begin somewhere else, with the model of a media receive peer support for their writing projects, center or a digital studio or a digital humanities lab students would now be able to come to the Sweetland (Table 1 attempts to provide a point-by-point Multiliteracy Center to receive support for new media comparison of these two models). Comparing these projects—including digital videos, websites, and two models reveals two broad sources of anxiety that desktop-published documents. The idea was that writing centers tend to experience as they move knowledgeable peers would engage student composers toward a multiliteracy center model. in conversations about all aspects of multimodal The first can be summed up with the accusation: composing—including words, images, sounds, and That's not writing. Writing centers tend to get anxious other media components. Importantly, while the SMC and to make other people anxious as they explore was staffed by specially trained consultants, included forms of composing that don't involve writing in the new technologies, and required the reconfiguration of narrow sense of the term. Q: Can you help me with existing space, it was still part of the writing center. It my video? A: Can we call it a video essay? Can we call was not a separate facility. it a visual argument? My presentation for the 2002 Computers and At the and Media Center, we don't use Writing Conference focused on this effort to establish writing as the central reference point for our work. If a multiliteracy center. During the Q&A session, one of you conceive of your video or photograph or sculpture the folks in attendance raised her hand eagerly and in terms other than those privileged by the field of announced that my presentation had made her very writing and rhetoric, no worries. No one will give you angry. The source of her anger was my brazen funny looks. disregard for disciplinary boundaries. I was A second major kind of anxiety concerns the transgressing long-established divides between visual status of technologies. Writing centers, in my and written communication. Writing centers, she experience, still feel anxiety when conversation turns warned, should stick to writing. for long periods of time to technical instruction, to That experience at Computers and Writing was tool panels and pulldown menus, and all of those not an isolated incident. As I have talked, over the past proper nouns (Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, decade, to local and national audiences, about how Photoshop, etc.). This feels reductive — a low, non- writing centers might conceive of themselves as intellectual, non-rhetorical kind of work (For critiques multiliteracy centers, anger was not an unusual of what Haas and Neuwirth call a “computers are not response. I have frequently encountered warnings: our job” (325) attitude, see DeVoss, Cushman, and You shouldn't do that! You can't do that! Writing Grabill; Haas and Neuwirth; Rice; Selber). centers should stick to writing! At the LMC, we are not embarrassed when we For the past two years I have been the director of provide technical instruction to composers. a different kind of multiliteracy center, a small Composers need support as they navigate the complex technology-rich space called the Language and Media interfaces that enable digital composing. They need Center (LMC), located within Michigan State University’s Residential College in the Arts and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 3 help with software and hardware. And we provide that reintroduced (almost) the original formula as Coca- help with no apologies and no strings attached. Cola Classic. I feel a sense of relief and freedom at the LMC. I think of this New Coke moment when I think of No one gets angry if a media center supports “non- the evolution of writing centers to multiliteracy writing” forms like videos, digitized paintings, or 3D centers. I wonder: Is this our New Coke moment? models made with our digital paper cutter. No one Coca-Cola was responding to a change in tastes, and gets angry if we address the technological challenges so are writing centers. The change—in particular associated with these forms of composing. giving the product a “new” label—created controversy My colleagues at other institutions, who richly and anger for consumers, and multiliteracy centers, as describe their experiences with writing-centers-as- David Sheridan has suggested, can bring up issues for multiliteracy-centers in the pieces that follow, reinforce writing center users, too. For years, I’ve advocated for me the many ways that writing centers make addressing multiliteracies in writing centers, yet I excellent starting points for multiliteracy work. In fact, haven’t been willing to take the final plunge and many of the assets that I took for granted in the rename our center. This decision may have kept the writing center have proven difficult to reproduce in peace, but isn’t without consequences. I’ll briefly trace the LMC. I struggle to recover many facets of writing through the murky territory where I live—directing a center practice, to get back the intellectual and writing center which aims to address multiliteracies infrastructural resources I once had (such as robust without being a multiliteracy center. structures for training consultants). I think a writing center can evolve its identity by At the same time, I think it is productive for pursuing four paths: (1) staff (re)education, (2) physical writing centers to ask what might be gained by redesign, (3) user (re)education or rebranding, and (4) relinquishing some of their key anxieties about name change. In my time at Ball State University, I’ve multiliteracy work. What might be gained, for instance, done the first three of these: I’ve trained tutors to if writing centers didn’t tether their work to any form address ; equipped the center with of alphabetic text and didn’t construct support for hardware, peripherals, and software to facilitate complex interfaces as beyond or beneath them. I think multimodal work; and have advertised formally and it is a real question as to whether or not those anxieties informally our ability to work with students on enforce important facets of writing center identity or multimodal work. However, the number of students whether they can be safely discarded as centers who actually bring in multimodal texts is quite small— embrace twenty-first century composing practices. (see despite the fact that all 7000 students (on paper at Table 1) least) in first-year writing each year are required to do at least one project that incorporates multimodality. Tastes Change Here’s where the name comes in—the Writing Jackie Grutsch McKinney Center. Writing centers in higher education have been In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola was losing the cola a success story. Though writing center insiders often wars to Pepsi. Coca-Cola researchers found that the feel misunderstood, I think the writing center story is American public favored the sweetness of Pepsi and in actually fairly legible. Most higher education folks 1985 Coke reformulated their 100-year old soft-drink (faculty, students, and administrators) could tell you to appease the tastes of Americans, advertising their (or guess pretty accurately) what a writing center does. change as “new.” Quickly the formula became known It is the legibility of the writing center name, I’d argue, as “New Coke,” and the fallout was immediate. Soda that helps spread this story. Yet, so far, the name is drinkers were angry—Southerners blamed the inelastic—users can’t see how a writing center would Northerners, Castro blamed capitalism, and groups be the place for feedback on poster presentations, like The Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing storyboards, web portfolios, audio essays, or the like. hoarded cans of “old coke.” Within 79 days Coca-Cola

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 4 On the other hand, the name Multiliteracy Center, was increasingly diverse, ranging from Prezi slides to though it might communicate being a place for accompany an oral presentation to videotaped research feedback on multimodal texts, seems to assert a break interviews for a final project to job audit forms. Many from the writing center tradition. Though writing of our regular visitors came to participate in study centers often have various names—writing studios, teams designed to develop information management centers for writing, writing labs—losing the word and deepen their learning in large general “writing” would be difficult for me. I’m not sure education lecture courses that ask students to students would know they could get (alphabetic text) synthesize material from oral presentations, films, writing feedback, and it might complicate who is novels, lectures, and traditional textbooks. These daily appointed to run and house such operations. Further, realities of practice had expanded our understandings I’m afraid moving response to digital texts to of the situated and pluralized nature of literacy. multiliteracy centers allows writing centers to be off The term multiliteracies was hardly new to us. the hook, not responsible for multiliteracy. Many dog-eared copies of the New London Group’s In short, I have no answers, just nagging book, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of ambivalence: Can we have a multiliteracy center that Social Futures, could be found around the Center. We isn’t called a multiliteracy center? The New Coke reasoned that a name change would signal our fiasco resulted in Coca-Cola Classic outselling both allegiance to its expansive theoretical framework, New Coke and its rival Pepsi. Flirting with reinvention particularly the way it of writing centers could bring to surface staunch • Recognizes English as a world language that loyalties as well. breaks into differentiated Englishes • Embraces the salience of linguistic and cultural Taking the Plunge: Renaming the Center diversity Nancy Grimm • Imagines students as active participants in social In the summer of 2010, I took the plunge that change Jackie Grutsch McKinney writes about and renamed • Reconceptualizes literacy from a singular noun the former Michigan Tech Writing Center as the promoting a ‘standard’ to a pluralized Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center. Like the understanding that includes the metalinguistic and summer long ago when I finally made it off the high metacognitive competencies required to mediate dive, the plunge was a long-considered, thoroughly varieties of English, discourses, modalities, and debated, and highly collaborative decision. contexts of communication The staff (professional, graduate, and The term ‘multiliteracies’ was, to borrow Grutsch undergraduate) advocated for the change because for McKinney’s term, far more elastic, and it suitably years we had been doing “so much more than working described the ways our practice had changed. The on writing.” name change provided us with the opportunity to Thus, our new name did not signal a sudden revise tired old brochures and posters and sparked change in direction but a desire for a more apt creativity in a ‘rebranding’ exercise. For those of us designation of what we do in the Center. For years we inside the Center and for the students who use the had taken an approach to staff education that Center, the name change was energizing. Not one understood “writing” as moving among discourses, student has questioned the relevance or even the cultures, , modalities, and dialects, all with meaning of the term: it assures them that the highly charged identities and communally recognized communication challenges they bring are ones we will ways of making meaning and always situated within engage with. political and ideological contexts. More of our regular However, the legibility (again borrowing from visitors brought fluency in languages other than Grutsch McKinney) of the term writing was one that English. The nature of the projects we consulted on

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 5 higher administration preferred. They expressed circulate around literacy. But the impetus to take the concern that the name change would plunge and embrace a term that more aptly describes • Indicate mission creep what we do indicates the intellectual fertility of writing • Confuse students center work, its responsiveness to social change, its • Place us out of sync with other state universities situated understandings of what it means to in Michigan communicate in a global contexts, its embrace of • Employ a word that “didn’t exist” emerging modalities, its awareness of students’ needs • Distance us from our “service mission” as 21st century communicators. I am pleased to be Their responses made it uncomfortably clear that little part of a conversation that is examining the tradeoffs. has changed in what the New London Group calls the “restricted project” of teaching English as a “Multimodal Thinking” and New Media formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule- Tutor Training Practices governed skill. From the administrators’ view, the Sohui Lee Center had become uppity, claiming a name for itself When I proposed in 2010 that the Hume Writing rather than dutifully accepting a designation that no Center offer consultations, our university longer suited our practice. In terms of the administrators were eager to make the shift. The need administrative response, the name change was, and seemed obvious, and they acknowledged the continues to be, a risky undertaking. As Matsuda and increasing number of academic courses at Stanford others have argued, the restricted project of literacy University requiring videos, PowerPoint presentations, teaching is linked to strategies of containment that and other forms of multimodal communication. While allow faculty and administrators to “send” students to political, financial, material, and even spatial hurdles a writing center rather than rethink the cultural and were easily overcome, I’ve wondered how we’d train linguistic assumptions underlying approaches to peer consultants to, as Grutsch McKinney notes, teaching. “address multiliteracies.” The consultants in our To complicate matters further, the term Writing Center’s core staff are lecturers in the writing multiliteracies is sometimes reduced to multimodality. program, some who teach visual and multimodal While the New London Group recognizes the growing communication; hence, we focused on recruiting and multiplicity of communication channels, its primary training these select instructors to pilot our digital argument focuses on the need to examine literacy media program. Looking forward, though, the Hume teaching in terms of “the disparity of education Writing Center—and, I imagine, many writing centers outcomes” (6). Thus, the multiliteracies project is not adopting digital media—will need to consider how simply about multimodality but also about access, peer consultants will learn and practice multiliteracies. about difference, about learning how texts of all kinds One means of introducing tutors to multiliteracies is function in systems of power that both enable and by encouraging what I call “multimodal thinking.” constrain our choices. Multimodal thinking is the ability to read and to The variety of responses to our name change give expression to content through a palette of modes signal a number of issues, many of which my that mixes and blurs “monomodal” representational collaborators here address. Some of the administrative practices (Kress and Van Leeuwen 45). Those who responses show the enduring power of what Brian adopt it recognize that twenty-first century Street calls the autonomous model of literacy, a model communication involves the exploration of a range of that encourages us to act as though the acts of modal and expressive possibilities. Here, I explain two producing and interpreting texts are guided by rules approaches that support “multimodal thinking” in that are obvious, culturally neutral, and correct. The peer tutor training: (1) the notion that consultants are responses also reveal a resistance to the idea of writing producers not just users or readers (they should be centers as innovators and the social anxieties that able to “produce” the modes they are analyzing); and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 6 (2) the situated practice of multimodal text provides there is also fluidity in the media itself: tutors who deeper learning. The first approach reflects the “practice” making new media arguments themselves concept of learning by doing; the second approach can greatly benefit writing centers by keeping emphasizes doing in context for a specific audience administrators informed of the shifting cultural, and purpose. The notion of “situated practice” comes technological, and social contexts of new media. This from the New London Group, who pointed to studies coming year, our Writing Center hopes to turn a small in cognitive science and other fields suggesting that the team of our undergraduate consultants into digital mastery of knowledge requires the immersion of the media consultants. In our plan for their training is a community of learners in constant, contextualized pedagogic practice that, I hope, invigorates their practice. The New London Group’s point was not “multimodal thinking.” only that multimodal practice was evolving and shifting—but also that multiliteracies require practice The Multiliteracy Writing Center: through production. Fostering Curricular Change For me, the implications for tutor training were Valerie Balester twofold. First, the idea of “situated practice” would In this story, a multiliteracy writing center has require that peer consultants perform their become the agent of curricular change. Like Nancy understanding of multimodal and visual texts. And Grimm, I believe the writing center and the university while we (as other writing centers) apply situated must address multiliteracies. To achieve this goal, the practice in terms of traditional writing tutorials, I center at my institution initiated curricular change, wondered how this would apply to our undergraduate even though we retain the name of University Writing tutor’s approach to multiliteracies. If administrators Center. The change involves three groups: (1) writing need to re-conceptualize “training” in multimodal center tutors, (2) faculty, and (3) students. Tutors must texts, what would it be? At the Hume Writing Center, revise their identities from experts in writing to experts our professional staff of lecturers, not peer tutors, lead in rhetoric; they must feel as confident advising about writing workshops: this is largely due to our access to writing a script or editing a video as they do advising lecturers with experience and expertise. However, we about writing papers. Faculty must be able to imagine may need to see presentations as not only service but literacy beyond traditional forms of paper and oral also training opportunities for all digital media tutors presentation and to understand how to assign and (professional and undergraduate tutors) to practice and evaluate new media. They need to have a better sense expand their knowledge. Regardless, undergraduate of what learning outcomes can be addressed with new consultants would need to continually “practice” their forms of literacy. Students need to understand the own multimodal communication skills—they could genres and composing processes for new media and not simply observe others’ practice and comment on it know that they can get help from the writing center during tutoring sessions. (or whatever we eventually decide to call ourselves). The second implication for tutor training is how And all have to understand “writing” more broadly, as situated practice can heighten our tutors’ awareness of composing in different media. new media’s kairotic instability due to variations in Our changes began four years ago, when under technology, audiences, and contexts. New media my direction the University Writing Center forms can change dramatically—and, in turn, change spearheaded a move to communication-in-the- how we make arguments as well as how we use them disciplines, requiring me to sponsor a motion through to make arguments: websites in 2000 are visually and the faculty senate. The motion, which passed, gave interactively distinct from websites of today. students the opportunity to produce and present PowerPoint of 1990 is radically different from posters, podcasts, videos, speeches, and web pages in PowerPoint 2007. As Valerie Balester will argue next, courses that count for a graduation requirement. Four there is fluidity in the rhetoric of different media, but years later, the courses are being proposed, although Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 7 most don’t venture beyond the oral presentation with teaching can transform the work of writing centers, as slides. We have seen a marked increase in requests for well as broader understandings of writing at our help with oral presentations and slides at the center. universities. I want to take this focus on teaching new Our next step, moving into audio/video and web- media one step further to describe what happens when based genres, will require another push from us to writing centers themselves start teaching new media educate faculty and tutors. writing classes. To provide some continuity for our tutors At the University of Michigan, the Sweetland between their work with written academic genres and Center for Writing began doing just that in Fall 2008. new media, we continue to invoke classical rhetorical Our aim was to address the paucity of new media principles such as audience, genre, and purpose. writing on our campus—both in first-year general However, we also have to deftly explore and adapt to composition classes and upper-level writing in the less-well defined genres. What are best practices for an disciplines classes. We knew some students and academic video or blog? Does anyone use the terms faculty in a range of departments were working with “podcast” anymore, and how is it different from a PowerPoint, websites, and blogs, and that electronic “screencast”? The media we teach are not always set in portfolios were gaining ground in several professional stone. Changes over the past decade in how best to schools and programs. We also knew the emphasis in create oral presentation slides exemplifies how much these classes was primarily on technical matters, and fluidity exists in the rhetoric of many of these newer that little attention was being paid to rhetorical media, and disciplinary differences continue to be as principles of audience, genre, and purpose. salient with slides as they are with articles or essays. Our first course in 2008 focused on the “Rhetoric Writing about a topic in a handout or an article of Blogging,” and since then, we’ve offered multiple requires very different strategies from creating a sections on fourteen different topics, in both 3-credit screencast about it, even when the purpose and and 1-credit versions. The goals of this course, which audience are the same. As a result, our tutors and our does not fulfill any college requirement, are to provide faculty have to learn to think rhetorically and a space where students analyze and apply rhetorical strategically as they engage students in new media principles in their writing with new media, work with projects. multimodal forms of communication, and become Creating curricular change that resonates with the more informed and critical consumers of new media whole campus requires that we develop the expertise writing. Our enrollment has been quite diverse, and resources that will give faculty confidence in ranging from first-year students to seniors in a wide assigning new projects and that will give students variety of concentrations and disciplines. And confidence that they can get help composing them. interestingly, in entrance surveys a majority of students The process is slow. We are incrementally changing report they elected the class not for any particular the way we are perceived through our marketing and academic purpose, but rather because it allowed them through the materials we offer for help. We are to further a personal interest of some kind—from working with our library to expand our facilities to add gaming to political action to nonprofit work. And as it a media studio and oral presentation practice rooms. turns out, it also has fulfilled employment goals of As we generate possibilities, we also create change. several of our students who have taken what they’ve learned in these courses directly into the workplace. Scaling It Up We feel these courses have been quite effective, Naomi Silver and that they meet an important need for our students, Sohui Lee and Valerie Balester provide powerful who come to the university with widely varying levels examples of how training tutors to support of experience and expertise with new media. A key multiliteracies and providing the resources students component of their success, I would argue, stems and faculty need for effective multiliteracy learning and from their location in the writing center:

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 8 • Writing centers operate according to an ethos of suggest, writing centers are powerful because of how collaboration and process-oriented problem solving. richly they conceive of tutors and tutor preparation, This is the future of much new media writing, which because of their deep connections to curricular is by necessity highly collaborative and distributed. structures, and because they adopt sophisticated • Because writing centers work with writers from models of composing and learning processes. In short, across the University, and at all levels, we have writing centers are powerful because, over the last extensive practice with the rhetorical moves and thirty years or so, they have developed a rich tradition genre expectations of many disciplines, which allows of praxis through self-critique, research, and theory- us to move nimbly into new media and new building. literacies as they arise. We can gain important insights into many of the • The authority structure of writing centers enables theoretical concerns explored here if we shift our genuine questioning of genre and mode, allowing us perspective, for a moment, from the day-to-day to place critical rhetorical analysis at the center of concerns of operating a writing center to the broader our multiliteracies pedagogy, which in turn promotes project of envisioning a 21st century university. genuine critical literacy and student ownership of the Universities need places where composers can come to learning process. This is a political goal as much as access the infrastructural resources (intellectual, an educational goal, as Nancy Grimm points out. technological, and interpersonal) that enable 21st- century composing. These places will necessarily be • Writing center pedagogy enables “coherence-within- multiliteracy centers. diversity” (Thaiss & Zawacki 139) regarding new Effective multiliteracy centers will require all of media genres, that is, it enables us to foster the self- the resources that writing centers already have in place: reflection and confident flexibility that twenty-first structures for recruiting and training tutors, strong century writers need to approach the varied writing connections to the curriculum, and robust theories of tasks created by an ever-changing media landscape. communicating, composing, and learning. Writing But as far as we know, we’re one of the few centers already have these things. Starting a writing centers around engaged in teaching of this multiliteracy center from scratch amounts to re- kind—for reasons of resources and institutional inventing the wheel. The challenge, then, is not (only) location, among others, to be sure. I’m interested in to cram multiliteracy practices into an already thinking about how writing centers elsewhere can take overwhelmed learning ecology. Instead, the challenge up this new challenge. As Valerie Balester suggests, we is to convince stakeholders (including students, faculty, have a responsibility to shake things up, to go to our and administrators) that universities will serve learners Dean or Provost to make the case that while we more effectively if they establish multiliteracy centers. should certainly be training our tutors to work with These centers, in turn, can function most new media writing and developing the infrastructure to productively if they are strongly connected to existing help them do so, we should also be taking the lead in writing centers and their traditions. In this way, despite teaching these forms and in creating a spread of effect our differences, our varied responses concur with the for multiliteracies within the university. The payoff for claim recently put forward by Christina Murphy and our students, our faculty, and our institutions is well Lory Hawkes that “Writing Centers [...] are the worth the effort. academic units best positioned by their philosophies

and histories to capitalize on the importance of e- Closing Thoughts literacies for the transformation of academics in the The goal of our essay was to explore and even 21st century” (174). This claim is not “idealized question the idea of multiliteracies in writing centers in romanticism” (North, “Revisiting” 10), but good a way that does not flatten out the discussion into pedagogy and good policy. useless binaries or unreflexive lore. As these accounts

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 9 Table 1 Traditional Writing Writing Center as RCAH Center Multiliteracy Center Language & Media Center

Focuses on writing. Other media are supported, but this Supports a wide variety of visual and Writing is assumed to be expansion is justified in terms of writing's multimodal forms of composing. Does of primary importance to increasing connectedness with other media. not theorize mission in terms of mission. Anxiety increases as writing is minimized. writing.

Invites composers to visit Anxiety increases when composers use the Invites composers to work for long for short conversations space for silent composing. This potentially stretches of time (many hours). with consultants. takes away space that could be used for Composing happens in the LMC. Composing happens having conversations with writers. Support is solicited as needed, if elsewhere. needed. Some composers work silently and never talk to a peer consultant.

Provides limited technical Anxiety increases the more conversation Helping composers negotiate complex instruction for word- focuses on technical instruction instead of interfaces and technologies is seen as a processing interfaces and 'real' concerns like rhetorical context and central part of mission. technologies. audience.

Provides few technological Anxiety increases when accessing technology The specialized hardware and software resources beyond tools becomes too central and/or technologies are of media production is seen as essential, related to word- too far removed from writing. Desktop from midi keyboards to camcorders to processing. publishing makes sense, maybe video, but digital paper cutters. midi keyboards and professional-grade microphones are worrisome.

Consultants are recruited Anxiety increases as consultants are Consultants are recruited for their for their ability to engage increasingly recruited for reasons other than expertise as media composers (video, student writers in their ability to engage student writers in web, desktop-publishing, etc.). productive conversations. productive conversations (e.g., an advanced videographer with no interest in writing ).

Stakeholders (students, Stakeholders need to be convinced that Stakeholders expect that a variety of faculty, staff across something other than writing happens and forms of media will be supported in a campus) expect that the should happen in the "writing center." "media center." focus of a "writing center" is writing.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 10 Works Cited

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu