Harnessing writers' potential through distributed collaboration: A pedagogical approach for supporting student learning in multimodal composition

Abstract

In response to the widely acknowledged challenge of instructor expertise in multimodal composition (MC) teaching, our article discusses a pedagogical approach called distributed collaboration (DC)—an approach that facilitates collaboration among specialists with varied expertise (e.g., new media specialists, software specialists, community members, local professionals, student teams) in an effort to provide L1 and L2 writers with the support required to deepen their multimodal literacies, develop communicative expertise, and enhance the quality of their multimodal texts. To illustrate the ways that students' multimodal writing knowledge, English language learning, and multimodal texts might be improved through distributed collaboration, our article profiles a graduate-level course in which student writers were tasked with composing multimodal texts for an on-campus program. In sharing our findings, we hope to provide instructors of English language teaching (ELT) and L1 composition with a generative pedagogical approach for harnessing writers’ full potential in MC projects.