Workshop: Dana Woodcock on Teaching Multimodal Composition as an Inclusive Discipline 

As part of Expository Writing Program’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Collaboration Grant, there will be a series of five workshops throughout Winter and Spring 2018 that address ethical approaches to teaching personal writing, antiracist assessment, canonical literature, autoethnography, and multimodality. Participants will come away with practical applications for their classrooms and teaching philosophies.

This fourth workshop in the series will be held on Friday, April 20th, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM in the Allen Library Research Commons Red Room A. Details below.

Workshop Leader: Dana Woodcock

Title: Teaching Multimodal Composition as an Inclusive Discipline

Description: As part of the “Antiracist Pedagogies Across Disciplines” series, Dana Woodcock’s workshop will focus on multimodal composition and its capacity to enable inclusion. More specifically, we will explore case studies that demonstrate how a conceptual reconfiguring of modalities within texts can create opportunities for groups traditionally marginalized from participation. These cases will include documentaries such as A Ballerina’s Tale and musical theater productions (i.e., Hamilton), whose modalities encourage and even demand inclusion. This reverse engineering will then pave the way for rethinking our assignment sequences, specifically the moments in which we can ask students to consider the potential space the modalities of their projects can create, and the possible boundaries they can cross.

Workshop attendees will leave with practical ideas and sample lesson plans that will help install such awareness into their classroom activities and course assignments. No prior experience with multimodal composition is required, nor is any pre-existing knowledge of multimodality necessary.

When: Friday, April 20th, 11-12:30

Where: Allen Library Research Commons Red Room A

For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact Emily George at ecg136@uw.edu, Olivia  Hernández at ojh26@uw.edu, or Dana Woodcock at dmw32@uw.edu.