ASSIGNMENT RATIONALE & PROCESS


In 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: “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 121). 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: “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? But we also need to realize that, even when a composition is primarily text based, its reception is bound to be multimodal – it will be accessed through screen-readers, enlarged, read across platforms, translated, and so on” (Dolmage 113). 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 quotes, questions, and principles in mind, I wanted to focus my attention for this project on the Fall 2022 academic quarter when I would be participating in the Teaching Apprenticeship Program (TAP) teaching a section of WRD 103 – Composition and Rhetoric I. In my role as instructor, I'd have 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 already-existing assignment that is typically given about halfway through the course – a Multimodal Composition in Two Genres – to be revised to focus explicitly on disability and designing accessible texts in ways proposed by both Hitt and Dolmage.


I view 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. In this way, students will be exploring what Hitt terms “the rhetorical potential of accessibility” or “making ethical choices about how they represent content, voices, and sounds, and thinking critically about how those choices affect their audience” (Hitt 90). This revision and assignment are supported by readings and modified versions of the in-class activities Hitt suggests throughout her chapter, “Guaranteeing Access(ibility) in the Multimodal Writing Classroom.”


THE ASSIGNMENT

While the revision to the assignment itself is not hugely significant, my additions explicitly center disabled perspectives and allow for a discussion and exploration around strategies for inclusivity and accessibility in the production of texts. Hitt argues that it is crucial for accessibility to be part of assignment design, and further argues that “like the other elements that writing instructors assess, accessibility cannot simply be a matter of whether there is an accessible component, but whether that component actually meets the needs of a wide range of disabled audiences” (Hitt 105). As such, I added the word “accessible” to the title of the assignment, renaming it “Project Three: Accessible Multimodal Composition in Two Genres” and added a requirement that students consider the access needs of their audience in choosing which genres to use. In having students tie their genre choices to each other to ensure the accessibility of their message, I hope to have them produce work that can meet the needs of a real disabled audience, as Hitt suggests. In addition, I make clear that I will be assessing their work based on the accessibility of their message. In this assignment, accessibility is more than including an accessible component as an accommodation; students must create texts that are actually functional for users with diverse needs.

 

The original version of the assignment tasks students with defining their own rhetorical situation and creating a multimodal composition using two new genres to communicate their message to an audience of their choice. In what I will term the “accessible version” of this assignment, I task them with considering those in their audience those who may have difficulty accessing or processing the information they present in their first new genre because of a disability and responding by using a second new genre (such as a transcript for audio, captions for video, and alt text for imagery). In considering their audience in this way, I hope to disrupt my students’ ideas of “the normative default bodies that we imagine as our audiences” (Hitt 89).

 

Hitt further argues that incorporating accessibility into assignment prompts and evaluation criteria “signals to students that these elements are as valuable as making claims, organizing ideas, and selecting appropriate media and design elements” (Hitt 105). As such, I wanted to make clear that I will be looking for and testing accessibility when assessing students’ work. Under the “What Makes it Successful?” sub-heading, I added the word “accessible” to the following original assignment language: “Your project will be most successful if you’ve clearly articulated a rhetorical situation for your composition and created two accessible genres that effectively respond to that situation.” I also added questions for students to consider under the “Getting Started” sub-heading to direct their thinking about disability and accessibility: “What barriers may exist for people with disabilities within your audience to access or understand your text? How might the genres you’ve chosen exclude people with certain disabilities? What rhetorical strategies will you employ to make your text accessible for this audience?”

 

My goal was to create an assignment centered on accessibility that was itself as accessible as possible. As such, simply adding language to the assignment about accessibility and requiring students to directly address disability in their genre selection would not be enough. Importantly, this revision addresses Hitt’s call for addressing accessibility practices in text creation while also “removing barriers for disabled student writers and making space for the multiple ways students access, engage, and compose texts” (Hitt 91). The original assignment for the Multimodal Composition in Two Genres assignment was, in my eyes, wordy: just over 750 words. Adding the requirement and explanation of attention to accessibility grew the assignment prompt to over 860 words. While this version of the prompt is thorough, it is text-heavy and potentially daunting to student with difficulties processing textual information.

 

I therefore decided that I should “remix” the assignment sheet to produce a version that is more accessible: less text, more white space, icons for navigability, bolded due dates for the assignment components, and clear assessment criteria. The accompanying document to this rationale titled, “Project Three Remix” reflects my attempt to redesign this assignment. My hope is that this document can both serve as a “quick look” at the assignment for those trying to plan out their scaffolded work over the course of the assignment and as a more accessible and comfortable text for those who cannot effectively use the original prompt for whatever reason.

 

I created this version of assignment in Microsoft Word utilizing styles to ensure that a screen reader could interpret the headings and body text. I chose simple icons to represent the major sections: an “i” icon for the basic information on the assignment; a checklist for the section on what students will turn in and when; and a checklist for the assessment section, “What I’m Looking For.” The icons are placed in-line with the text and have alt text associated with them so that a screen reader will describe the icon, read the sub-heading, and then read the body text below. I also included two hyperlinks on this version of the assignment: one to the original, “wordy” version for students’ reference, and another to the Statement of Goals and Choices (SOGC) assignment component. For the purposes of this assignment, however, the first link is not active as the course’s D2L site is not yet active. I also ran the ‘Check Accessibility’ diagnostic within Word on the document to check that the assignment sheet is accessible. I hope to be able to talk through this “remix” with students to explain how and why I made these changes, and I think a short classroom activity on navigating the accessibility functions of Word and other composing software would be a beneficial component of this assignment.


CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES

Hitt spends considerable time in her chapter detailing rhetorical practices that are often considered to simply be accommodations for people with disabilities: transcripts of audio, captioning for audiovisual materials, and alt text for images. Hitt’s argument, however, is that these practices are “opportunities to create multiple access points” for all students and to “illustrate accessibility as a vehicle for empowering disabled student writers and making space for nonnormative expressions of rhetoricity within the multimodal writing classroom” (Hitt 91). As such, I intend for this project to utilize the following classroom activities suggested by Hitt to prepare students for the revised assignment.


TRANSCRIPTION ACTIVITY 

“Making audio accessible is important for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, and it can also be useful for people who do not or cannot focus on or process audio well, people who are in a time crunch (for whom skimming a transcript is often more effective), and people with unstable internet connections or limited data, who may benefit more from viewing a PDF than streaming audio.” (Hitt 92)

 

CAPTIONING ACTIVITY

“Captions, like transcripts, benefit deaf users and folks who have technological constraints or who may benefit from receiving the content both textually and orally. Brenda Brueggemann also observes that captioning video can help reach broader and more diverse audiences, making that video ‘instantly global.’” (Hitt 101)


ALT-TEXT & IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS ACTIVITY

“Another practice for making visual content accessible is the use of image descriptions, which I discuss as both a creative practice that allows marginalized students to express their nonnormative rhetoricity, and as a demonstration of the rhetorical potential of an accommodation.” (Hitt 111)

 

READINGS

In addition to reading Clint Johnson’s “On Genre” and Cheryl Ball and Colin Charlton’s “All Writing is Multimodal,” which are both already included in the WRD 103 syllabus, I also have my students read chapter three of Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism, “Imaginary College Students” while working on this project. I find this chapter to be useful in providing definitions and context for creating multimodal texts, what ‘literacy’ means and what it means to have multiple literacies, and why accessibility is important. Dolmage defines ‘multimodality’ as “communication and composition across textual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and visual resources,” and defines ‘multiliteracies’ as “a term coined specifically by one group…to talk about the skill developed by communicating across these modes and the skill needed in order to communicate across these modes” (Dolmage 99). The former term should be “agnostic” and “descriptive” while the latter should “work as an assessment, a measure” (Dolmage 99-100). The problem for Dolmage is that these two words are often conflated by institutions attempting to create more inclusive, accessible, and democratic writing education, and that many students who think and express themselves in “nonnormative ways are actually further excluded by pedagogies of multiplicity” (Dolmage 100). Dolmage’s writing is incredibly accessible – his language is easy to understand, and the book is also available online for free and in audio format – and the length of the chapter (16 pages) seems to me a reasonable addition to the students’ workload.

 

I also read selections from Hitt’s chapter “Guaranteeing Access(ibility) in the Multimodal Writing Classroom” as a group during class so students can understand why I have redesigned the assignment in this way. I specifically want to make sure to cover her discussion of accessibility positioned as accommodation (89-91) and selections from her descriptions of classroom activities tied to transcripts, captions, and alt text. To me, this is part of sharing my own positionality as a new teacher who is himself learning about how to teach writing. I want to share with my students what I found so useful about this chapter so they can understand how the assignment they are completing came to be. I want to present this assignment as a work in progress and an attempt to enact change in the First Year Writing classroom by drawing my students’ attention to the rhetorical potential of accessibility and the ethical production of texts that are honest and inclusive.


WORKS CITED

 

Dolmage, Jay. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. University of Michigan Press, 2017.


Hitt, Allison Harper. Rhetorics of Overcoming: Rewriting Narratives of Disability and Accessibility Writing Studies. National Council of Teachers, 2021