Stephanie Wheeler

Stephanie.Wheeler@ucf.edu

Powerpoint

Composing Bodies: Narrative, Multimodal Composition, and Disability

Introduction: I Am UCF

Bourelle, Clarke-Oates, & Bourelle (2017) argue that students benefit from multimodal

instruction with regard to understanding and applying rhetorical concepts, literacy skills, and

self-empowerment. The authors assert that multimodal pedagogy require(s) “students to make

informed decisions based on rhetorical considerations” like audience analysis, purpose, and

appropriate delivery mediums (p. 81). Whether the focus is on the design process or the final

delivery of a text, multimodal narratives have proven to be effective in helping students and

scholars understand a number of concepts by providing opportunities to embody composition. In

doing so, it positions writing as something beyond what the academy tends to regard as an

exclusively intellectual practice.

Yet, without an intentional look at the pedagogical possibilities of disability theory in

rhetoric and composition classrooms, the benefits of multimodal composition cannot contest the

image of the academic writer creating intellectual products that exist independent of the material

reality of the body. This paper will offer a case study of a campus-wide digital storytelling

project that combines approaches from Theater, Digital Media, Disability Studies, and Writing

and Rhetoric to illuminate the degree to which disability and materiality are integral parts of

multimodal writing. By centralizing materiality and access in the creation of students’ digital

narratives, I hope to demonstrate how its success and effectiveness rely almost exclusively on the
attention to the body in its development and delivery. Doing so will reiterate the crucial role of

the composing bodies of our students in classrooms and beyond.

Background

I Am UCF developed as an interdisciplinary digital storytelling initiative in the style of

StoryCenter1, to represent “the diverse narratives of the University of Central Florida campus

body” in an online platform (I Am UCF, 2018, n.p.). The project brings together faculty from

across the university, including from the departments of Theatre, Digital Media, and Writing &

Rhetoric as well as the UCF Center for Social Justice and Advocacy. The initiative began in the

Fall 2016 academic semester with a pilot series that produced six (6) digital stories, and by the

Spring of 2017, I integrated the steps of the pilot project into her “Writing Across Difference”

course. “Writing Across Difference” is an upper level course in the Department of Writing and

Rhetoric that explores how writing and rhetoric can negotiate challenges across cultural,

political, linguistic, social, and ideological differences. For this particular instantiation of the

course, I focused on three major concepts: authentic ground, rhetorical listening, and ‘techne’.

Krista Ratcliffe’s (1999) concept of rhetorical listening is “a stance of openness that a

person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” (Ratcliffe 1999: 17).

Central to rhetorical listening and its function in the course was the purposeful move to listen

with intent, rather than for intent, meaning that students should listen to different perspectives for

the purpose of hearing and understanding that perspective. Authentic ground is the perspective

that “all peoples are equally deserving of respect, and that if we dare to explore the interstices

1 StoryCenter’s model involves facilitating digital storytelling workshops around the country (and the world), during
which participants learn how to make their own digital videos. This well-known model (Lambert 2010) is one that
has been taught in digital media courses at UCF for over a decade, and serves as a useful introduction to digital
storytelling for students learning the basics of story structure, digital production, and visual storytelling, before
moving on to explore interactive narratives, mobile storytelling, and other digital storytelling forms (Miller 2014).
between cultures and between peoples in a way that requires us to tell the stories of other peoples

as they impinge on us and as we impinge on them, the onus is on us to proceed with openness

and with respect” (McGown 163). Standing on our authentic ground makes rhetorical listening

possible. Lastly, techne is a rhetorical term meaning craft, skill, or discipline. Students were

challenged to think about how rhetoric functions as a ‘techne’, that is, a skill for communicating

effectively and ethically. As part of understanding effective communication skills, ‘techne’

emerged as a way to familiarize themselves with digital storytelling platforms in order to use that

medium as effectively as possible.

The semester culminated in a final project that engages all three concepts in the form of a

digital story to be submitted to the I Am UCF project. The project challenged students to explore

the role of the ‘techne’ and its relationship to technology and persuasion in order to demonstrate

what it looks like to empower the storyteller, the story, and those who connect with that story. A

total of eight students completed digital stories that were to be integrated into I Am UCF.

In the Classroom

Centralizing the I Am UCF project as the final project of a writing course – not a digital

media course, or even a digital writing course – meant that I needed to frame technological

practice or use of technology in Platonic’s view of ‘techne’. For Plato, any technological practice

or use of technology needs to be supplemented by “nontechnical” wisdom -- what Plato calls

“moral knowledge.” The I Am UCF digital story does just this: it is a technical piece that is

supplanted by stories, that is, conceptions of what our own knowledges are and where we stand

based on those knowledges. This project served as a way for students to understand how and

when we could truly write across difference: we aren’t defensive, we write with clarity, and we

write with purpose. The I Am UCF project allowed students to see themselves as part of a larger
audience that is building something bigger than them -- not only are the people who are hearing

their stories their audience, but they are their own audience as well.

To help them connect with the part of their identities that they wanted to explore with the

narratives, I integrated theater exercises to re-engage their bodies in the storytelling process and

to discover entry points into their understandings of their own perspectives. Yet for students in

an upper-division writing course, re-engaging their bodies was incredibly challenging, as much

of writing pedagogies asks students to do dis-engage their bodies as a strategy of focus and

mind-work. Students were thus incredibly unsure of how theater exercises would help them

become better writers because they had been taught their entire college careers that better writing

comes from more writing.

Yet what started off as a challenge became the course’s greatest success. As a Disability

Studies scholar, my goal is to bring the body back into writing, which meant that I needed to

confront my own discomfort with extroverted theater practice, and model this process to my

students. The most powerful moment in the course came after a lesson about storyboarding and

filming techniques, during which I had students read chapters from Garland-Thomson’s (2009)

Staring: How We Look, which theorizes “how to look by showing us how [those being looked at]

look” (Garland-Thomson 2009: 196). I asked students how they might represent their stories in a

way that invited the audience to engage with them. Students intentionally employed the digital

tools in order to make storytelling a co-creation with their audiences. The theater exercises asked

them to stage a pose that represented something about them, and then have a partner take a

picture of them that represented something about the photographer. As a result, students’

approaches to their digital stories considerably shifted: expressing personal narratives became

less about themselves and the digital skills they picked up throughout the course and more about
putting themselves “out there” in order to connect with their audiences in order to empower

them.

Works Cited

Bourelle, T., Clark-Oates, A., and Bourelle, A., 2017. “Designing Online Writing Classes to

Promote Multimodal Literacies: Five Practices for Course Design.” In: Communication

Design Quarterly Review, 5 (1), 80-88.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 2009. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leeworthy, Victoria, 2017. “Stardust.” I Am UCF,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk4OwvM5C28&t=14s. Accessed 16 Oct. 2017.

McGown, Rima Berns, 2003. “Writing Across Difference: Standing on Authentic Ground.” In:

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 23 (1), 163-171.

“My Favorite Murder Date.” 2017. I Am UCF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHueLQnn9EY&t=30s. Accessed 16 Oct. 2017.

Pearce, Rebekah, 2017. “Hair.” I Am UCF, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tE_SVnYcUY.

Accessed 16 Oct. 2017.

Ratcliffe, Krista, 1999. “Rhetorical Listening.” In: College Communication and Composition, 51

(2), 195-224.