Metacognition, Multimodalities, and Messiness. . . Oh, My!
Getting Ready for the Revised OWEAC Outcomes
Information Literacy Advisory Group of Oregon Summit
Vancouver, WA
May 13, 2017
Michele Burke: Faculty, Chemeketa CC; [email protected]
Kate Sullivan: Chair-Elect, OWEAC; faculty, Lane CC; [email protected]
OWEAC
Revised Outcomes Oct. 2016
Shaped by The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011), The WPA Outcomes for
FYC (2014), and The ACRL Framework (2015)
Questions/Scenarios
● A faculty member asks you to help her students find thirty sources.
● A faculty member asks you to: show students how to find a newspaper article; find a
book; find an OED Entry; find a LC SH; Use a database; find an article in google scholar
● A faculty member asks you to do “the library presentation” & help him figure out a
multimodal approach to information literacy
● A faculty member asks you to help students transform a topic--”sushi”--into a research
project
What do you do?
How did we get here? (and what are we doing in this presentation)
There have been key shifts in approaches to student learning in the past decade:
Literature around student dispositions and college readiness
Question of transfer
Threshold concepts instead of outcomes
Focus on metacognition
Information on ethical and intellectual stages of cognitive development in learners
Greater attention to the role of critical reading and college success
Literature on Student Dispositions and College
Readiness
David Conley’s Conception of College Readiness, which is different than academic
preparation/content knowledge
The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing’s 8 habits of mind: curiosity, openness,
engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility and metacognition)
Importance of that students understand “College Culture” and schools make the “hidden
curriculum” visible (Gerald Graff; Rebecca D. Cox)
The Issue of Transfer
Near and Far Transfer (surface vs. deep transfer)
Challenges with non-traditional students misunderstanding the goals of college (“right
answers” vs. learning to ask good questions)
Helping students build schema in intentional and useful ways
Focus on shifting from tacit to explicit knowledge (understanding when to apply procedural
knowledge)
Threshold Concepts vs. Outcomes
Jan Meyer and Jay Land
Goal is to help students “decode the disciplines” and invite them into discourse community
Threshold concepts reveal the epistemology and logic of a given discipline, and as such, they
are: integrative; transformative; irreversible; bounded; troublesome; re-constitute;
discursive
The Role of Metacognition
Metacognition is, simply put, thinking about one’s thinking. More precisely, it refers to the
processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding of one’s understanding
and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and
learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner. ( Nancy Chick, Center for Teaching,
Vanderbilt)
Why focus on metacognition? It increases students’ ability to transfer and/or adapt
learning to new situations and new tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cooking, How People
Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, 2000, 12)
Will help students understand what they know and do not know (counteract the DunningKruger effect)
Role of Cognitive Development (from report writing to inquiry; apple picking to making
strudel)--thanks, William Perry!
1. Dualism: all problems are solvable--there are right and wrong answers
2. Multiplicity/subjective knowledge: 2 kinds of problems—solvable and ones we can't
answer, yet. Students' job is to find right answer (for the first kind of question);Second
kind of question, student's job is to turn inward for guidance
3. Relativism/Procedural: there are disciplinary reasoning methods; Student's job is to
learn to evaluate reasons to determine what's right (reliance on experts in discourse
community, again, as sources of evidence to evaluate)
4. Commitment/Constructed Knowledge: Nuanced & complicated; knowledge is discipline
specific and involves on-going construction by members of discourse communities and
Role of explicit reading instruction & IRW courses
Recognition that reading is task-, genre- and discipline-specific
Thus, students aren’t finished learning to read (in 3rd grade)
Faculty need to help students understand that they have (or should have) different reading
strategies for different genres/kinds of texts
Slow reading is good reading
Rereading is good reading
Key Focus & Goals of New OWEAC Outcomes
Rhetorical Awareness & Flexibility, including development and use of
rhetorical vocabulary
Metacognition
Increased Focus on Genre & Multimodality
Goal of helping students understand disciplinary knowledge
Inherently recursive, not necessarily strictly scaffolded
Anne Beaufort’s Model of the Five Domains Expert
Writers Draw Upon:
College Writing
And Beyond (2007),
Page 19
Genre--can be a slippery concept
Genres serve the interest of discourse communities and have features and follow conventions
They can be within modalities or draw on modalities (and be shaped by the affordances of the
modality)
Some genres are dictated by platform (twitter), while others will be shaped by the
platform/mode of delivery but also exist in multiple formats (e.g., a digital version of a
graphic novel [as opposed to a web comic that exploits the “Affordances” of the infinite
canvas of the web])
Examples of academic genres: précis, abstract, lab report, literature review, response paper
Examples of outside-of-school genres: brochure, proposal, editorial, book review, prezi,
multimodal, NOT “modes”
Historically the term “mode” was used to describe particular rhetorical strategies: make an
argument, write a description, tell a story . . . (typically without a rhetorical context)
Multimodal = compositions that use more than just a linguistic (alphabetic) modality to
present information: e.g., audio, video, photographs, drawings, etc. See Ball, et al.
Multimodal compositions frequently employ several modalities: linguistic/alphabetic, visual,
aural, spatial, gestural
E.g., a blog with photographs, embedded video
Multimodality, cont.
“Multimodal” does not:
necessarily mean multimedia ‘though multimodal texts may use multimedia
mean digital or online, either (a novel with images, like John Gardner’s Grendel, is a
multimodal text)
require that authors use all five modes (what’s important is the why and when of composing-are the communication modes used rhetorically effective?)
One of NCTE’s Declarations on The Importance of Multimodal
Literacies
It is the interplay of meaning-making systems (alphabetic, aural, visual, etc.) that teachers
and students should strive to study and produce. "Multiple ways of knowing" (LELAND &
Harste) also include art, music, movement, and drama, which should not be considered
curricular luxuries.
All modes of communication are codependent. Each affects the nature of the content of the
other and the overall rhetorical impact of the communication event itself. [. . .]
With the development of multimodal literacy tools, writers are increasingly expected to be
responsible for many aspects of the writing, design, and distribution processes that were
formerly apportioned to other experts.
Collaborative Multimodal composition Options . . .
*Information life cycle assignment--single significant event (Storify, blog platform): e.g.,
the 2017 Women’s March
Scholar profile--formal and informal footprint mapped on padlet: e.g., a profile on Neil
DeGrasse Tyson
*Infographic on how to conduct academic research
Unfamiliar {multimodal] genres assignment or Composition across-three-genres
Rhetorical analysis of digital and print modalities on the same issue/topic (student project
might include images, sound clips, and alphabetic text)
Questions?
Email Kate or Michele: [email protected]; [email protected]