New technologies and digital media have altered the way we read, write, make connections and communicate in our everyday lives. According to Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, Academic Director of CALA’s M.S. in Professional Writing program, that makes this a very exciting time for writers, communication specialists, and anyone interested in understanding the multimodal ways modern narratives are consumed and produced.
In their recently published review “Unflattening” Our Ways of Seeing, Reading, and Writing, Kristine and co-writer Lalitha Vasudevan review Nick Sousanis’ graphic novel Unflattening—a theoretically ground text that takes seriously the blending of visual images and written words. Written and drawn entirely as a graphic novel, Sousanis’ text embodies and validates the stance it advocates for. The unconventional format seeks to literally unflatten conceptions of meaning, reading, and writing through an active embrace of multimodality in its integration of images, design, and various genres of written text.
Going forward, Kristine and Lalitha will continue to co-edit the Professional Resources column for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, inviting the journal’s readers to consider the impact of new and emerging communication practices on their pedagogical practices. To that end, they have lined up a mix of resources for review over the next year, including written texts, graphic novels, documentaries, and mixed-media pieces.
Read an excerpt from the review and check out some of our favorite pages from Unflattening below.
Inviting his readers to challenge “what Marcuse called ‘a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior’” (Sousanis, [6], p. 6), Sousanis encourages us to “step out and look anew” (pp. 25–26). In selecting this book as the inaugural text under our editorship of this column, we would like to encourage practitioners to engage Unflattening with the goal that Sousanis describes within the first chapter: “to discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities, and to find ‘fresh methods’ for animating and awakening” (p. 27).
[… ] In reviewing Unflattening for this column, we echo Sousanis’s ([6]) statement that “to prepare good thinkers we need to cultivate good seers” (p. 81). Without being prescriptive, this text does the work of both advocating for and being an example of taking seriously image in concert with other modes of expression to open spaces of understanding and seeing differently.
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CALA’s M.S. in Professional Writing program encourages our students to develop multidimentional ways of thinking, seeing, and writing. Our program prepares students for critical, active, and engaging professional writing careers across industries.
For more information on the program, please visit our website:http://www.scps.nyu.edu/academics/departments/humanities-arts-and-writing/academics/ms-in-professional-writing.html
Applications for the Fall semester are currently under review, so don’t delay!