When: March 25, 2014, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Where: Charlotte Frank Classroom (1203 HE)

Presenter(s): Sean Molloy, English; Wendy Hayden, English

According to CUNY Composition scholar Liz Clark, college writing teachers now face a “digital imperative.” She argues that unless we teach digital composition, our students will be left on the wrong side of an “emergent digital divide,” untrained in digital rhetorics, and left with only increasingly obsolete but “more comfortable essayistic literacy.” In this session, we will use examples of student work to raise and explore questions about the critical, rhetorical, and creative possibilities afforded by digital composition.

The work we will share was part of an informal pilot to reimagine ENGL 120, Hunter College’s required first-year writing course, as a course in multiple forms of literacy and composition. In this ENGL 120 model, students compose google docs, wikis, websites, movie essays, and digital rhetoric research projects– all in order to examine writing, thinking, persuading and creating across multiple genres and modalities. Our goal is to challenge all students to ask their own questions and then to deeply, honestly consider those questions as they explore the creative, persuasive and intellectual possibilities of collaborative composing and digital publishing.