Multimodality as a Communicative Tool for Social Engagement and Reform

This article acknowledges the viability of multimodal projects in first-year college-level writing courses in accordance with the evolution of composition pedagogy over the past forty years. Since the 1982 publication of Hairston’s article “The Winds of Change” forecasting the end of the then-ubiquitous current-traditional approach, composition pedagogy has undergone paradigm shifts from process to post-process theory and from textual to digital modes of composition. Inspired by Goodwin’s (2020) research on students’ multimodal responses to local community issues, I developed a public media project for my first-year writing course for which students created media texts addressing local, regional, national, and global issues of their choosing. The project synthesizes the public and interpretative dimensions of writing identified by post-process scholars with elements of multimodality and civic engagement to help students understand how public media texts raise social awareness of current issues and mobilize community efforts toward unified resolution of such issues.

Foreword

Poetry is multifaceted and timeless. Resultantly, its subject and its crafting provide a rich array of possibilities for engagement and use. Within this edition, poetry is presented as powerful, with the kinetic energy to teach, transform, and heal, even while revealing, subverting, and problematizing. These seven narratives from across the Caribbean region and beyond share the writers’ personal and professional encounters with poetry, and, as such, are strategically situated within this edition to chronicle the multiple perspectives of composition, pedagogy, culture, recitation, performance, gender, and therapy.

Self-Regulation and Adult Learners

The ability to write effectively becomes increasingly essential in our global community. Writing is a cognitively complex and demanding activity. Thus, writing instruction assumes an increasing role in language education in general, and writing proficiency heavily depends on the acquisition and development of self-regulation and transcription skills. With self-regulated learning (SRL), students create better learning habits, strengthen their study skills, monitor their performance, and evaluate their academic progress. The body of research in composition and language teaching highlights the self-regulation impact on beginning and developing writers' competencies in diverse cultural backgrounds. Hence, educators should be aware of the factors influencing their manipulation of SRL in their writing classes. This article addresses some of these factors directing the composition pedagogy for more adult learners' deliberate practice and high self-regulation beliefs. It pinpoints some research-based classroom strategies for more effective teaching.

Bach and Busoni Essentials in A Chaotic World

The study analyses the manifestation of structural change from the Bach Violin Chaconne (BWV1004, c.1720) to the Bach-Busoni piano transcription (c.1897). This article explores the use of two-dimensional music abstraction for vertical (pitch height) and horizontal (time) and its signal insignificant identified bariolage sections in music. Bariolage excerpts are chosen for they are implied sounds captured in repeatability and recontextuality. The first part of the article offers an excerpt of the Bariolage from violin at bars (113-120) and its parallel piano transcription at bars (118-125). Significant expressions of registral change utilizing different voice parts (Soprano, Alto, Tenor) offer a wider expansion with piano. These excerpts were chosen after reviewing the original Bach Chaconne and its essentials in analytical aesthetics for the projection of beauty in symmetry-asymmetry-chaos in composition. This study captures the aesthetics of the beautiful from the original score of the violin Chaconne at (bars 89-96) and (bars 113-120) for Bach-Busoni piano transcription. Further, there are recommendations for future studies to explore vertical spaces and mathematical sequences embedded in the music in other sections. The findings of this study were implied through new music analytical formats to be applied in composition, pedagogy, and performance practice.

Pedagogies of Creativity in Music

This chapter explores the notion of pedagogies of creativity and creative pedagogies in music composition. Drawing on Amabile’s categorization of “domain-relevant” and “creativity-relevant” skills, the chapter uses historical and contemporary examples to indicate the interrelated nature of these skill sets, specifically through a historical case study of the pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger. The chapter presents the notion of composition pedagogy as a “signature pedagogy” that operates as a series of collaborative apprenticeships undertaken in spaces and places of professional practice that promote the cognitive, practical, and moral aspects of composition as a professional practice. In a world where the notion of music creativities is ever expanding, the interdialogic relationship of pedagogies of creativity and creative pedagogies provides a way forward for composition learning and teaching.

Honoring Languages: Review of Creole Composition: Academic Writing in the Anglophone Caribbean

In traditional Caribbean villages, the bell crier made important announcements from street to street. People listened and carried the news further. Like the proverbial bell crier, Milson-Whyte, Oenbring, and Jaquette, along with fourteen contributors announced “We are here. And we doin’ dis—‘write [ing] our way in” to academic spaces (Creole Composition, 2019, p. x). Creole Composition provides current perspectives on post-secondary composition pedagogy, academic literacies, and research across multiple academic disciplines. Indeed, this intersectionality addresses Browne’s (2013) argument that Caribbean vernacular orientations and practices fly beneath the radar of the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. Caribbean institutions of higher learning must embrace Caribbean students’ creole-influenced languages.