Storyboarding for Invention: Layering Modes for More Effective Transfer in a Multimodal Composition Classroom

This article describes an innovative pedagogical technique for multimodal courses: the use of storyboarding as an invention tool across multiple composition platforms. Student response data and our textual analysis of their multimodal texts over a two-year period reveal some challenges when new media projects are taught alongside essay writing. Our research also shows that basic writing students were more likely see similarities between the two assignments when they were asked to use a similar process of invention. Utilizing composition concepts in tandem to compose two similar but different products (essay and video) that ostensibly reside in different spaces and times provides opportunities for teachers and students in the basic writing classroom to discuss conventional compositional moves—context, style, evidence, warrants—and to discuss argumentation more broadly. Reemphasizing the role of invention in multi-modal instruction as a aitical component in the process of new media instruction may help students' ability to transfer writing knowledge from one assignment to another.