Multimodal peer review 4 c15 parfitt2

Peer Review as Genre:

Multimodal approaches for developing rhetorical knowledge

By Elizabeth Parfitt

The genre approach works in tandem with recent scholarship in

digital writing and rhetoric which asks instructors to consider

multimodal and born digital texts as strong forces of change in the

field of writing studies. In such projects, “the authors…insist on

involving audio, video, and textual elements in reciprocal

conversations with one another and with readers, listeners, and

viewers-establishing semiotic exchanges that become more than the

sum of their individual parts” (Selfe and Hawisher). Professional

peer review is already evolving to create space for multimodal

projects which inherently require different kinds of criteria (for

example, Self and Hawisher note that anonymity has become next to

impossible in a digital age.) As writing classrooms follow the

professional and public turn, student peer reviews need to change to

accommodate advances in digital work. Multimodal peer reviews

provide one opportunity for students to access aural, visual, and

textual genre knowledge from the public sphere and apply it to peer-

to-peer response practices.

Peer Review as Process Peer Review as Genre The Multimodal Experience

“…peer review is at the heart of epistemological and scholarly practice.” --Kathleen Blake Yancey, College Composition and Communication June 2012

A WORKING DEFINITION FOR OUR

CLASSROOMS

peer review noun

1. a process for the revision that asks peers to

evaluate academic work for future drafts.

2. a genre of writing that calls on students to

critique peer work.

3. a multimodal project that asks students to

apply rhetorical and genre knowledge to create a

public conversation about writing and revision.

During peer review, students are asked to

demonstrate rhetorical moves that are consistent

with those of most academic writing.

1. making claims and stating positions

2. supporting claims with examples and

explanation

3. questioning unclear or problematic ideas

4. exploring passages that are meaningful or

important

At the essence of the peer review experience, writers are

sharing their words and trying to find ways to connect with

readers. In sharing those words, writers also share ideas, ways

of communicating, and pieces of themselves that flow through

the process.

1

2 3 1

4

Essay

Narrative

Position Paper

Critical Review

Academic Research

Report

WHY PEER REVIEW? Innovation often begins by revisiting past

practices and revising those methods in a new framework that

accounts for modern tools and knowledge. Peer review has a

fairly recent history in modern composition pedagogy, stemming

in large part from collaborative learning theories and peer tutor

practices brought forth by Kenneth Bruffee in 1979 at Brooklyn

College. These practices are still used to train peer tutors and

new writing teachers in many programs across the country.

Beyond that, many first-year writing programs utilize peer

review as an integral social component to the writing project

drafting process. You will be hard-pressed to find a composition

teacher who hasn’t tried peer review as a tool for revision and

establishing rhetorical judgment in the writing classroom.

“A primary task for teaching genre awareness is to keep

form and context intertwined. Using examples of already

acquired genres and contrasting one familiar genre with

another, teachers can lead students to discover the

rhetorical purposes served by particular generic forms.”

Amy Devitt, Writing Genres

Extending the idea of review as process, teaching peer review

as a genre in the first-year writing classroom puts students on

the path toward greater genre awareness. By studying the

exigence that calls on writers to respond to peer work, students

also negotiate a set of conventions, affordances, and constraints

brought forth with each new situation.

“At the center of all these reviews are the criteria

used to make evaluations….Whether readers find a

review persuasive will depend to a large extent on

whether they believe the criteria used are justifiable.

At times readers may accept the criteria used and yet

not agree with how the criteria are applied. In other

cases of evaluation, people disagree not because they

apply shared criteria in different ways but because

their criteria of evaluation differ altogether.”

--John Trimbur, The Call to Write

Review

Peer Review

Album Feview

Literature Review

Intellectual Critique

Peer review becomes a genre that is equally as important as

the academic essay, the narrative essay, the research report or

the myriad other genres instructors teach in the first-year

classroom. Students study the conventions and purpose of the

genre, as they learn and practice rhetorical moves that transfer

across college classrooms.

Case Study # 1: Peer

reviews go public as

part of multimodal

web projects.

Case Study #3: Audio reviews ask

students to consider the rhetorical

choices afforded by different modes

of communication.

Case Study #2: Peer reviewers

provide multimodal suggestions for

evidence in writing projects, based

on research and genre knowledge..

• Description of the project

• Strengths

• Limitations

• Suggestions for improvement

• Entry points for further work

• Evidence and explanation of the evaluation

• Knowledge of the field

• Strengths

• Limitations

• Recommendations for future work

• Assessment for publication

• Anonymity

Valued Criteria

Student vs. Professional Peer Review