ACCESSIBLE MULTIMODAL COMPOSITION ASSIGNMENT

In her 2021 book, Rhetorics of Overcoming, Allison Harper Hitt makes a compelling argument for the importance of teaching accessibility as a crucial part of the ethical production of multimodal texts. She says, “Simply put, teaching students to create multimodal texts without attending to accessibility is unethical, limits students’ understandings of audience and meaning-making, and results in the production of potentially interesting but ultimately inaccessible information.” Hitt’s argument is important, because as Jay Dolmage argues in Academic Ableism, the field of composition has itself acknowledged that the process of composing has become increasingly multimodal. Dolmage says that “This acknowledgement means that the tools and avenues of composing need to be reconsidered in terms of accessibility. Which bodies can compose which texts, under what circumstances?” If multimodal composition is becoming the norm, how can we ensure that the multimodal compositions we produce are actually accessible? How do we teach accessibility? Do we teach accessibility?

With these questions in mind, I revised this First-Year Writing assignment for the Fall 2022 academic quarter when I would be teaching for the very first time in the Teaching Apprenticeship Program (or TAP) teaching a section of WRD 103 – Composition and Rhetoric I. TAP is an opportunity at DePaul for advanced graduate students in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse to teach a section of WRD 103 for academic credit. WRD 103 is the first course in a required two course sequence that focuses on supporting students' further development of rhetorical knowledge and engages them in composing genres including but not limited to academic essays, with required components including a rhetorical analysis, multimodal project, and culminating digital portfolio. 

While the first five weeks of the course were collaboratively refined with my cohort and advisor to be consistent across TAP instructors, I had some measure of flexibility in revising the major reading and writing assignments in the second half of the course. I recognized the potential for an existing assignment commonly used by WRD 103 instructors about halfway through the course – a Multimodal Composition in Two Genres – to be revised to focus explicitly on disability and designing accessible texts. I viewed this assignment as an opportunity for students to experiment with genres and modes of delivery with a specific audience in mind – people who may not be able to easily make sense of the information they are presenting in another format, or people who may just prefer to get their information in a different way. In other words, I wanted students to choose genres that are explicitly geared toward accessibility. In this way, students would be exploring what Hitt terms “the rhetorical potential of accessibility.”