In the end, weaving a meaningful narrative using music, images, video, text, and voice really made the assignment worthwhile. The video editing and text creation were important aspects of that process, but it is the people who watch the film — those who may not already love martial arts or understand why or how it came to the States — whom I kept in the forefront of my mind during the composition process. The struggle to accurately represent the views of others forced me to think critically about the way the film would be received and therefore I had to think critically about the various media I was collecting and composing for the documentary. As part of being able to choose my own topic and interview people I knew (and some I didn’t know that well), I learned that it’s important to frame others’ comments in ways that are fair to them while still choosing clips that are interesting to read or see. Ethics became a bigger concern when I knew the people whose words were being represented in my documentary. That’s something that may be more difficult to relay (to students, to audiences) when you’re dealing with impersonal texts. The creation of a research proposal for the documentary — while not a lot of people’s idea of a good time — was a great learning experience that helped me foresee the ethical choices I had to make in the media I used. The proposal allowed me to put what were just ideas down on paper in a way that could be systematically useful to both my professor and me. Even in a narrative text, the research you do can and should change the direction of that text. If I had been unflinching in my drive to sell my message, it is likely that the significance of the message itself would be lost. One of the biggest lessons I took away from this project was that being given more power over my education (i.e., choosing the genre, focus, and media for my assignments) gives me more motivation to perform. It’s something that I knew before but that was emphasized by this assignment. I liked all the other classes I took that semester, but I found myself worrying and working on the documentary in preference to other classes. Also, the assignments that led up to the documentary work focused on one aspect of the documentary process and were great preparation for the final project. For me, the introduction to technologies (such as the audio-editing software) was unnecessary because I’ve worked with them my whole life, but I can see how it was important to other members of the class, and I was able to help others who needed it if I already knew how to do a particular assignment or task. In the end, the sequence of individual media assignments leading up to our documentary research proposal, storyboard, interviews, and choices in editing the media clips provided me with a process in which I could understand how to ethically compose a multimedia text for a specific audience and purpose.

BALL, Cheryl E.; BOWEN, Tia Scoffield and FENN, Tyrell Brent. Genre and Transfer in a Multimodal Composition Class. In: BOWEN, Tracey; WHITHAUS, Carl (Eds.). Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 pp. 20-1.

In this fragment of text you will find a report from an English student named Tyrell about his report on ending a course in digital genres. After reading the report, choose the sentence from the text that may represent the concept of ‘agency’ in practice as it relates to digital genres, multiliteracy and technology.