I gave a presentation at the Southern Regional Composition Conference in May titled “20th Century Crot Esayy Meets 21st Century Multimodality.” I wanted to write an article about this assignment, so I’m making myself write this post as the first part of a possible article.

One of my goals in teaching first-year writers starts before the semester begins with emailing students my list of 26 titles of graphic memoirs for a semester-long project. Then, for the first introductory discussion or class fast write, students take the VARK questionnaire developed in 1992 by Neil Fleming and C. Mills. Telling me what type of learner they are, if they have read a graphic memoir or novel, and what field of study they are pursuing. If you don’t know your learning style, click on the link above. Try it, then leave me a comment if you learned something new about yourself.

When I was in high school, English was not my best subject, and I can still hear my teacher telling me, “You are a creative writer; however, you need to learn the fundamentals.” I know the fundamentals are the ‘later-order concerns’ or the last part of the writing process for any piece of writing. I also learned there are multimodal literacies, not one literacy. My teaching philosophy reflects this, as I learned from Jewett & Kress when I was writing my grad project.

“ . . .These literacies are like an old-fashioned lace doily with threads of image, gaze, gesture, movement, speech, music, and sound effects woven in language, culture, time, and place to communicate meaning. This literacy doily will be different for every human being and will reflect each person’s learning style— visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic, or multimodal— developing over a lifetime”(McCombs).

I’m a multimodal learner, leaning more toward the visual, as you can see in my literacy doily above, the word visual is the same size as the word writing. Per my syllabus, my students write all of their assignments in Google Drive documents, allowing them to incorporate images and hyperlinks, and share with me and fellow students for peer review comments, a digital multimodal writing experience.

On the first day, I take students out of their comfort zone by introducing them to Scott McCloud’s “Chapter 2: The Language of Comics,” from Understanding Comics, which is about “icons.” I then have students draw their iconic self, which will be incorporated into their first written assignment, the crot essay “Who Am I?” I use comics in my writing class to help level the playing field between those high-achieving read/write learners and the aural, visual, kinesthetic, or multimodal learners.

Here are a few student examples. One of my favorites is the last one above; she did not like drawing; however, she portrays her iconic self well with that one simple line for her frown. Their iconic self drawings are then incorporated into the crot essay, helping tell me a little bit about each student.

The crot essay “Who Am I?” assignment asks students to write about 10 childhood learning moments in at least 5 different genres or types of writing. To help students get started figuring out their learning moments, I have them create a childhood learning moments timeline with dates and icons, moments that shaped who they are today. I have them start with their birthday in the lower right corner and curve their way up to the top, present day. I share my example, and they begin creating theirs during class.

To help students learn what a crot essay is, for day two, I have them read Melinda Putz short article “The Crot.” Putz’s definition: “A crot could be a single sentence, a quotation, a proverb, a list…, a description of a scene, a dialogue, a poem.” They also read Sherman Alexie’s “Unauthorized Biography of Me,” which is an example of a crot essay that starts with his short bio, then a scene of Indian boys playing basketball until it is too dark, then a thesis statement, and so on. We will discuss both articles and do a group activity during the next class.

So, on the first day of class, they were introduced to Scott McCloud and drew their iconic self. They also started a childhood learning moments timeline, and they got to know some of their fellow classmate. Stay tuned for part two.