Peer Reviewed Publications:
| 2022—Pedagogy | Film in the Composition Classroom: Moving Away from the Film Supplement Abstract: Though students increasingly view and create cinematic media in their daily lives through apps like Snapchat and Tiktok, instructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors do use films in composition courses, they often treat them merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. However, this pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this quantitative and qualitative research study, I argue that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. I call for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film’s supplemental use and towards more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. For this project, I work with relevant scholarship about film in composition classrooms at the collegiate level. I navigate the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to my larger claims of film’s educational import. I consider a number of studies (Durst, 2015; Bowen and Whithaus, 2013; Edgerton and Marsden, 2002; and Costanzo, 1986) about film in college classrooms, the definition of literacy in the twenty-first century offered by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ (WPA) desired learning outcomes for first-year composition students. I argue that composition instructors should teach students to use basic film analysis and filmmaking terminologies (close-up, tracking shot, editing, cinematography, etc.) to make rhetorical meaning, rather than merely generating interest in relevant course topics through entertaining content. To make this claim, I situate film as a critical form of cultural communication and media, and I contend that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements. Instructors should therefore incorporate film and other audiovisual media into composition curricula. I relate the results of my IRB-approved research of my composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. Throughout the project, I call attention to existing classroom models that use film as supplemental to course material, rather than as a form of composition itself. |
| 2021—Kairos | Stream-lining Collaboration: Twitch and Participatory Composition Abstract: The theory within my multimedia project stems from critical participatory rhetoric scholarship over the past decade from Sarah Arroyo (2013) and Laurie Gries (2015, 2018). Arroyo situated YouTube as the site of new developments in media composition, establishing a rhetoric of collaboration and audience participation. She made use of Gregory Ulmer’s critical concept of electracy to discuss the new media landscape of collaboration in video composition. She called attention to the commanding language that the platform uses when speaking to its users by opening her book with the line, “Embed. Share. Comment. Like. Subscribe. Upload. Check in” (p. 1). Similarly, Gries attributes Arroyo’s notions to New Materialist circulation theory. In my video, I move the discussion towards other platforms—most notably Twitch—as spaces for multimedia composition that challenge the twenty-first century notions of point-to-point broadcast structures, through the creation of narrative collaborations between content creators and audience members. While the kind of “rhetorical transformation” (Gries, 2015, p. 14) on YouTube first requires publication before circulation, adaptation, and parody, rhetorical transformations on Twitch happen instantaneously, leading to real-time narrative collaborations. Twitch is the site of tremendous infrastructural innovations, like Twitch Plays Pokémon and Crowd Control technologies that further situate media composition as collaborative in the twenty-first century. |
Book Reviews:
| 2019—ImageTexT | Shaw, Zack. Review of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, by Thomas LaMarre. University of Minnesota Press, 13 March 2018. |
Editorial Introductions:
| 2021—ImageTexT | Anastasia Ulanowicz, Zack Shaw, and Ayanni C. H. Cooper. Editors Introduction to Issue 12.1. |
Conference Presentations:
| 2020 New Orleans, LA | Society for Animation Studies 32nd Annual Conference Rhetorical Potential and the Animated Sequence (Accepted but not delivered due to the COVID-19 Pandemic) |
| 2020 Milwaukee, WI | CCCC Qualitative Research Network Best Practices to Combat the Film Supplement in Composition (Accepted but not delivered due to the COVID-19 Pandemic) |
| 2020 Boston, MA | NeMLA: 51st Annual Convention Film and the Popular in Composition |
| 2019 Gainesville, FL | University of Florida: Pedagogy Multimodal Lesson Plans for Writing Classrooms |
| 2018 Pittsburgh, PA | University of Pittsburgh: Undead Media Conference Animated Film, Death, and Othered Cultures |
| 2017 Gainesville, FL | University of Florida EGO Conference: Transformation Fluid Bodies and Fluid Minds |
| 2017 Pleasantville, NY | Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference (NEWCA) Multimodality, Tutor Training, and Product vs Process |
| 2016 Boston, MA | Northeastern University EGSA Conference Metamorphosis of the Human Form in Miyazaki |
| 2015 Waltham, MA | Shakespeare among Others Richard III and Queen Margaret |
| 2015 Salt Lake City, UT | National Conference on Peer Tutoring and Writing ESL Creative Writing Program |