This is a video review of Ben Opipari's website Songwriters on Process. In this review, I examine the pedagogical value of using this website in the writing classroom. Opipari's website is particularly useful for process pedagogy and writing about writing curricula, allowing students an opportunity to examine how musicians design their music and work through their generative and revision processes.

Writing teachers who use autoethnographies and other metacognitive writing assignments to ask students to explore their composing processes can use Opipari's website as a resource for teaching students about the complexity of the writing process. This website is also valuable for writing instructors interested in examining multimodal writing processes. Examining how musicians combine sounds and text to generate multimodal forms gives us didactic models of multimodal composing for students and teachers to examine and discuss in the classroom.

Video Review

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Autoethnography Assignment

The autoethnography assignment referred to in the video review is designed for a composition I course, using a writing about writing (WAW) frame and curriculum to design the objectives for the assignment. The autoethnography assignment asks students to make connections between their writing process and the writing processes of other writers and makers they are learning and reading about in the course material.

Bio

Dan Martin is an associate instructor of writing and rhetoric and a coordinator of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at the University of Central Florida where he teaches a variety of writing courses, including Writing in Digital Environments, Composition I, Multimedia Composition, and Composition II. His research centers on how digital and multimodal writing are shaping knowledge in different disciplines. Professor Martin is also interested in semiotics and new media, and he tends to investigate a variety of digital tools, media, and forms through the lens of semiotics.

References

Berkenkotter, Carol. (1983). Decisions and revisions: The planning strategies of a publishing writer. College Composition and Communication, 34(2), 156-169.

Martin, Dan. (2017). Intro and outro music [Recorded by Dan Martin]. [MP3 file]. Orlando, FL.

Perl, Sondra. (1979). The composing processes of unskilled college writers. Research in the Teaching of English 13(4), 317-336.