| Abstrakt: |
When teachers first learn to teach multimodal composition, they often expect to experience certain challenges with the class, such as problems with their multimodal composing experience or their lack of theoretical knowledge. However, instructors new to multimodal composing may overlook more mundane problems such as issues with learning management systems or students' hesitancy to try something new. In this study, we followed eight new graduate teaching assistants as they started teaching and taking classes at Ohio University, a large Midwestern R1 institution, focusing specifically on three representative case studies. We present the challenges these new multimodal teachers expected before teaching, what they experienced while teaching, and what stood out to them upon reflection. Through these interviews, we found that the GTAs were concerned about their own multimodal experiences and knowledge early on, but during on-the-ground teaching, these issues rarely came up. Instead, student struggles with multimodality and more common day-to-day teaching issues were larger concerns. Their teaching fears shifted as they taught their first multimodal projects with students, and other more common and well-documented teaching problems took center stage during and after the semester. Based on what we learned from the interviews, we offer some suggestions to help mitigate these struggles in new multimodal teachers by setting up courses and mentoring to make multimodal teaching less of an internal and practical challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
