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Engineering Beowulf: World-building in a multimodal composition classroom

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Abstract

This article provides a research-driven pedagogical perspective on world-building, drawing upon the author’s experiences teaching Beowulf in a multimodal composition course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. World-building and multimodal pedagogy may combine smoothly in first-year college composition courses to simultaneously introduce students to medieval literature and communications concepts. For many students, such courses are their only required exposure to either field; by using world-building techniques, instructors may create an inclusive and student-centered course, one that does not force a choice between literary study and learning practices of compositional rhetoric.

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Notes

  1. For expected education outcomes of ENGL 1102 at Georgia Tech, see ‘Common Policies’ (2017).

  2. I deliberately generalize work to protect student privacy.

  3. Student scorn for composition is well known and explored; instructor and institutional contempt for the craft is insidiously omnipresent but rarely acknowledged, and yet practiced upon the most vulnerable members of our profession.

  4. To encourage reflection, I return to the exercise at the end of the unit.

  5. Palmeri (2012, 23–84) provides an excellent history of process as a dominant concept in writing and composition practices.

  6. Bean (2011) and Palmeri (2012) respond to this type of first-year composition course. For other perspectives on whether these approaches are fully viable, see Lindemann (1993) and Belcher and Hirvela (2000).

  7. My colleague Kara L. McShane of Ursinus College first used this exercise while we were teaching at the University of Rochester.

  8. Genre-based writing is a creative use of conceptual and alphabetic templates; writing guides such as Graff and Birkenstein (2014) make this explicit to students and instructors by identifying ‘key moves’ and providing template phrases that help students overcome phrasing-based conceptual blocks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL, USA

    Valerie B. Johnson

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  1. Valerie B. Johnson
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Correspondence to Valerie B. Johnson.

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Johnson, V.B. Engineering Beowulf: World-building in a multimodal composition classroom. Postmedieval 9, 44–57 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0065-z

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