Introduction
PEACHES: In the fall of 2019, the State University of New York’s Council of Writing Conference focused on art-making in writing curriculum. I was completing my dissertation on expressive arts curriculum in the writing classroom. Expressive arts are processes of art-making utilized in therapeutic and educational settings to allow for emotional expression and reflection. They are inclusive because they do not require artistic skill, instead encouraging users to experiment and play with materials (Knill & Knill, 2017). Through my practitioner action research, I have found that expressive arts engage my students (Hash, 2020b), provide diverse methods for literacy practices (Hash, 2020a), and facilitate therapeutic experiences (Hash, 2020d).
CHRIS: The SUNY COW Conference was an opportunity for me to get some feedback on some ideas I had been working on for years. Although my specialty is in hybrid and New Media rhetoric, I was influenced by a recent book that discussed the affordances of paper. As much as we are trying to evolve into a paperless society, there is still a persistent value to material forms of communication (Sellen & Harper, 2002). In a related vein, much of my pedagogy has been influenced by older Happenings-based Expressivism (Deemer, 1967; Lutz, 1971; Sirc, 2002) combined with more contemporary comics pedagogy (Barry, 2014). I’ve always seen the composition classroom as based in experiential exploration of a topic through hands-on media and alternate learning styles. In connection to a return to a paper-filled classroom, I began experimenting with short and simplistic paper-based drawing exercises that provided metaphors and analogies to important compositional skills. What all of these activities had in common was that the artwork was noticeably and deliberately bad. This became my topic for the SUNY conference: the importance of bad art in the composition classroom.
PEACHES: I taught at a public university in North Carolina, while Chris worked at a private four-year Catholic university in New Jersey. Although we came to the conference representing different writing programs and institutions, we noticed that we had shared values when implementing creative methods in writing courses. Our pedagogical methods such as art-making, building, and experimentation create educational experiences for students that disrupt passive learning (Dewey, 1934/2005). With creative methods, students engage in nonlinear processes of composition that include more voice and critical thinking than alphabetic text allows for (Graban et al., 2013). Creative methods also bring pleasure and joy into the classroom (hooks, 1994; Love, 2019); however, once the COVID-19 pandemic moved our courses online, we recognized that the activities we carefully crafted for students would need to be modified or eliminated. Additionally, we felt our creativity was being stifled personally and professionally.
As a way to support each other and document how our teaching changed or remained the same during pandemic conditions, we decided to send multimodal mail to each other throughout the spring of 2021. We were inspired by the work of some of my colleagues who were experimenting with Expressive Arts, community, collaboration, and arts-based research. In their article “Love Letters, Notes and Post Cards: About Pedagogy, Ways of Knowing, and Art-Based Research,” Miller et al. (2013) collaborated through a series of postcards that they sent to each other, building an epistolary dialogue about the need to reconsider new methods of art-based inquiry and ways of knowing. They sought “new awareness and insight [that] invites dialogue with a broader audience” (p. 109) and to work from uncertainty and “incompetence”—from positions of not knowing (p. 111). Traditional methods of knowing, the authors argue, “cause humanity to lose our sense of communion, our belonging, with the world [resulting in] the loss of a lived experience of interbeing with all that surrounds us” (p. 113). The result of “Love Letters” was a collage of overlapping, nonlinear ways of knowing that illustrated both individual and collective voices.
We decided to take inspiration from Miller et al. (2013) and send to each other via snail mail multimodal illustrations and projects based on our teaching experiences during the pandemic. Sending multimodal mail provided us with ways of knowing ourselves and each other better, through sharing lived experiences, exploring uncertainty in inquiry, and representation through our art-making. But our correspondence also facilitated community through expression, experimentation, and reflection that we both found lacking in our individual professional lives during the pandemic.
Theory
CHRIS: A core design of our correspondences was to re-examine collaborative methods. The history of scholarship on collaboration seems fraught with tension over the development of a multivocal, heteroglossic voice. There is a desire for harmony and dissent, community and individuality. Earlier scholarship on collaboration followed what Kenneth Bruffee referred to as the “Conversation of Mankind.” Entrance into any community requires assimilating the standards of that community; however, most new contributors enter into this “normal” discourse with a lack of familiarity with it, leading to uncertainty, critique, and dissent as a natural part of collaborative dialogue (Bruffee, 1984; Trimbur, 1989). Following this conversational analogy, an important part of collaboration has been the pooling together of resources from different communities. Collaborative theories especially prize knowledge gained or contributed from involvement with communities outside of academia. How does this knowledge align with that of academic or professional discourse? It often doesn’t. Academic discourse thus often misses the mark of understanding how collaboration truly works (Myers, 1986; Smit, 1989; Harris, 1989; Gergits & Schramer, 1994).
In response to any inadequacies found when comparing academic with professional or community discourse, scholarship on collaboration continually seeks an ideal of what collaboration truly means, arguing that some collaboration is stronger than others (Elbow, 1999). Especially important aspects of defining collaboration involve how much individual voices are maintained and how much work is individualized and separated prior to and during collation (Kittle & Hicks, 2008). What we typically see in collaborative interactions is a divide between individualized, compiled “cooperation” and synchronized, shared problem-solving which is seen as a truer form of collaboration (Dillenbourg, et al, 1996). Collaboration, thus, exists on a continuum, with contributors working in varying dynamics as well as varying levels of contribution (Buchanan, 2003).
The metaphor of the Burkean parlor has since taken over Bruffee’s Conversation of Mankind. The Burkean parlor analogy describes discourse as like entering into a conversation where a topic is already being discussed. New contributors begin in uncertainty, needing to catch up with the conversation and find their own place in that perspective (Davis & Shadle, 2000; Goodburn & Camp, 2004; Purdy & Walker, 2013; Graff & Birkenstein, 2014). As the pandemic abruptly derailed our curricula, we found ourselves thrust back into states of uncertainty despite our years, if not decades, of experience in teaching First Year Writing courses. We felt the need to embrace this uncertainty—this feeling of incompetence—as a starting point of inquiry into our own pedagogies and pedagogy during the pandemic. Although we teach similar courses and come from the same general field of academia, Peaches and I still differ in the nuances of our communities, whether it be geographically, domain-based, or a matter of pedagogic approach. We had hoped that our intersections and differences would help deepen our inquiry during a time when tradition was being deconstructed.
Process
PEACHES: We decided to send multimodal snail mail to each other multiple times throughout the semester as a way to document our experiences and thoughts as instructors of writing during the pandemic. We took a self-study approach of creating multimodal products that could lead to better understandings of ourselves, our curricula, and our constructed knowledge (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2004). Although we are both writing instructors and are comfortable communicating with alphabetic text alone, we agreed that capturing, composing, and producing images would enhance our products. Images stabilize ideas (Allen, 1995), while also allowing us to communicate in metaphorical ways. As Berthoff (1981) explains, metaphoric images serve to remind, but also encourage users to “discover relationships and how they might be articulated” (p. 7). Additionally, because images predate alphabetic text as a method of communication both historically and developmentally (Efland, 2002), images assist in the ways people communicate with each other, making the process more inclusive.
CHRIS: Our communication also sought to experiment with varying collaborative forms. Collaboration works in stages, involving both productive and reflective actions which use different cognitive-expressive functions (Dale, 1996). Collaboration will also vary between synchronized dialogue where voices flow together and shared individual efforts. Our own collaboration, likewise, had stages which involved different methods of interactions as we sought to provide models of both harmonizing and individuality. To accomplish this goal, our projects were done individually to emphasize our diverse lived experiences, and then shared. To balance our individual voices with a more multivocal, heteroglossic approach, throughout our project, we communicated using different media. In the beginning stages of our project, whenever we received an artifact, we would then lay out longer responses to the artifact in dialogue constructed in a shared Google Doc. The beginning of our collaborative activities was the most collaborative as the idea formation process and start of the project required both a rapid and deep inquiry into the nature and execution of the project. The initial Google Doc responses to our first couple of projects created an intense dialogue as we communicated almost synchronously to shape out themes in our project expression while planning responses to each other’s artwork through the next round of our art.
PEACHES: Figures 1-3 depicts my process of composing multimodal mail in the Spring 2021 semester. The beginning of the semester began positively. I started the semester energized to make my arts-based writing course even better online after teaching the curriculum for a year during the pandemic and finding success in ways art-making supported student expression (Hash, 2021; Hash, 2020c). In the first two visual artifacts (Figures 1 & 2), I depict myself with vibrant colors despite what is going on around me, representing my enthusiasm and positivity. I also write a great deal to Chris in these cards, outlining specific activities that I found success in. By April, though, there is a clear shift. I branched out with different media and no longer included myself in the art. Towards the end of the semester, I was quite exhausted from a year of teaching online. But I still was able to combat my negative feelings of fatigue and loneliness with my students’ art and reflections. In my last visual artifact (Figure 3), the word art of my students’ reflections featured the largest words “time,” “art,” “feel,” and “hope,” indicating that my curriculum did have a positive effect on students. Looking through my images, it is clear that while I may not have maintained the same levels of enthusiasm and energy all semester, my arts-based curriculum was still providing the types of educational experiences I hoped to provide for my students.
CHRIS: Figures 4-6 presents my projects. I began our collaboration by sending to Peaches a slew of photos my students had taken of various pre-pandemic projects, including Halloween pumpkin carving, balloon art, and using building blocks as a metaphor for compositional structure. I wanted to capture the hands on, material nature of my pre-pandemic pedagogy. Adjusting my pedagogy to the limitations imposed by the pandemic, I admittedly struggled with how to maintain the creativity of my lessons. I experimented with low stakes projects students could create at home but because of Institutional Review Board restrictions, the results of my various experiments were unusable, and we decided, instead, that I should focus more on creating my own art.
I was rather disoriented: my creative energy was channeled into my lessons rather than my own personal art and the sudden change up resulted in a detachment from my own expression. With my first two artifacts (Figures 4 & 5), I went through an automatic rhetorical-productive response: take raw emotions without really feeling them, find an interesting medium, assemble the product. Done. Next? No real investment. But as I continued with my projects, patterns were forming in my expression. I was frustrated feeling repressed by pandemic conditions in the classroom whereby universal pedagogy focused almost exclusively on student mental health and not on what the instructor was experiencing. My projects became about bringing to light these issues.
In addition, starting with my second visual artifact (Figure 5), I became more aware of the revisionary elements of the artistic process I was going through and how medium really affects the artistic process. Each artifact was a prototype rather than a perfected product. I wanted to get out as many ideas as possible rather than dwelling on anything particular. I turned to serial composing scholarship to support this approach (Sirc, 2010). As part of this quick revisionary strategy, I struggled with available text and materials. I would have an idea which didn’t quite translate into practical implementation. I needed instead to work with what I had, often encountering new materials as I explored what was available. Medium proved an inspiring challenge: keeping the dimensions of a postcard was especially difficult. As I worked with more artifacts, I was better able to express the physical genre dimensions of the postcard, relying less on written information and more on creating an inherent interactivity in each artifact that prompted either a written response or created more of a physical-material play with the artifact itself. My disorientation turned into renewed energy breaking out of rote design, but as the semester ended, I felt I was done.
Reception
CHRIS: Peaches’ first postcard (Figure 1) set the standard we were working with artistically as well as the experience of our snail mail communication. As much as I wanted to unplug, sending mail via the post office was a rather nerve-wracking experience. We were concerned about mail getting lost and there was always this impatient anxiety—“is it there yet?!” Plenty of times, I tracked a package because mail during the pandemic was so slow. Eventually, I switched to UPS which was quicker but more expensive.
Peaches’ second postcard (Figure 2) upped the ante by moving from a standard two-sided postcard to a multi-page artifact. I loved flipping through the pages and turning the card to read multidirectional text. Since we had so much we wanted to communicate, it was difficult fitting everything on a single postcard. I was inspired to reconsider the constraints of the postcard format and how they could be worked around.
My first artifact, a scratch and sniff postcard (Figure 4), was a response to Peaches’ particular philosophy on the nurturance of students. I responded by focusing instead on the well-being of the teacher rather than the class. The standard response I was seeing in pandemic discourse was to focus on the class community.
PEACHES: When I got Chris’s mail, I was always excited. So much of my interactions with students, colleagues, and friends was restricted to Zoom, causing me to suffer fatigue. Getting mail, on the other hand, disrupted my daily routines. Even when Chris told me he sent something, I had no idea which day it would arrive, or what the mail would include. I remember feeling how big my smile was and enjoying the element of touch, especially when Chris’s mail called for physical interaction such as scratching off areas for messages or opening a box. I was not a passive recipient of his words, but an active participant in discovering what he experienced.
There was a great deal of joy during our collaboration, but also significant growth. As I made my mail for Chris, I began to think more about how I could fully express my experiences in multimodal forms, not just what happened to me, but how I felt. As the semester progressed, I noticed that my tone began shifting from positive to more vulnerable, allowing Chris to see more depth in my struggles of teaching during the pandemic.
Chris’s journey seemed different to me. While my semester began with a lot of creative energy, I felt myself fading at the end of the semester. It was difficult processing my negative feelings and physically sending them for someone else to help carry. Chris, in contrast, was always emotionally expressive. He began the semester discussing loss, sending me pictures of what his students completed before the pandemic. When we realized using former student data might prove difficult because of IRB restrictions, I encouraged Chris to make his own art, which disrupted his initial notions about our project. Chris had to look within himself to consider what he wanted to create and make design decisions about execution. After he did this, I noticed a marked difference in his mail. Over the course of the semester, Chris utilized far more different materials than myself, deviating into nonlinear storytelling. As his creativity blossomed, I found myself increasingly excited to see what he would do next. It inspired me to try new materials for my last mail to him, and made me think about how many instructors in higher education have creative energy running through them, but may not have the invitation to tap into it.
CHRIS: Following my scratch and sniff project, communication in the Google Doc diminished as there was a sense that we were getting caught up in the seasonal midterm slump and various affairs outside of the project itself. My explosion box (Figure 5) was an expression of concern where, as part of the pandemic, there was a devaluing of art, liberal arts, and of teachers in general. It seemed as if our own artistic project was being affected by other more practical or immediate concerns. At this point, my projects were responding more to my own individual personal experiences unrelated to co-author communication. This signaled to me a change in the nature of our collaboration.
With her third postcard (Figure 3), I saw Peaches opening up more. Her thoughts were always on her students and trying to shed optimistic rays of sunlight in the darkness of the pandemic; expressing her anxiety, in a warped way, felt like a breakthrough. As such, our communication was not only a matter of how we expressed ourselves but also what we were expressing.
Conclusion
CHRIS: At the end of any project, there is always a reflection of how things went. The strength and difficulty of working from uncertainty is that we were constantly unsure about how our project was going to unfold and about the form our project would take. If we had to do it again, what might we do differently?
At the risk of sounding Pollyannaish, I don’t feel a need to go back in time and polish up our process or retake any unsteady steps. I have considered that the nature of our collaboration might not fit into a scholarly ideal but that such ideals are just that—ideals which do not always manifest in the actual process. We sought and achieved a collaboration that allowed us our individual voices but also one which combined those voices into a strong dialogue. Any rough edges might come from a fluctuating disproportion of one polarity over another or an unevenness in the flow of collaboration.
What I feel I personally achieved to contribute to scholarship on collaboration is the role of interactivity and medium, either as individual concepts or amalgamated. Scholarship continually seeks out new technologies upon which to theorize collaborative evolution (Spooner & Yancey, 1996; Kittle & Hicks, 2009, as two examples spread out over a decade), but often misses out on the affordances of older technologies, like paper or snail mail, or of artistic media, like watercolors or sewed-on buttons. In working with the constraints of artistic, multimodal, snail mail postcards, the interactivity between collaborators and media was re-examined. There is a whole playground of media open there for analysis.
PEACHES: Chris and I did not know each other well before beginning this project, and as the semester progressed, I felt like the multimodal mail facilitated getting to know each other better. The multimodal aspects allowed us to express ourselves in nuanced, creative ways that alphabetic text alone may have restricted. I also noticed that our creativity seemed to build off of each other. When I felt myself become overwhelmed with creating art, getting Chris’s in the mail rejuvenated my excitement and creativity. In a time of limited interaction, creativity, and closeness due to the pandemic, I felt like there was one person in my professional life who still cared about finding ways to make creative pedagogies “work” in writing courses. Additionally, I became invested in Chris’s life because he provided such a rich window into it that was not limited to a computer screen.
Now that the semester has ended, I see that Chris and I supported and inspired each other in a way that was lacking in my own department. As an educational leader, I wonder how departments can provide invitations and opportunities for creative, empathetic, supportive collaboration not only during times of crisis, but beyond. Chris and I already had a shared interest in creative pedagogies in the writing classroom, but beyond that, we worked at two different universities and had different interests; yet, we still grew together because we found a way to collaborate in a way that felt pleasurable instead of forced and restorative instead of draining. Our next step may be to examine our process and provide suggestions for other educational leaders who are interested in facilitating multimodal collaboration.
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Peaches Hash is currently a Senior Lecturer within Appalachian State University’s Department of English. Her research interests span pedagogy, arts-based research, and expressive arts. Some of her recent publications can be found in Art Education and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.
Christopher McGunnigle earned his PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with an emphasis in New Media. He has been working at Seton Hall University in New Jersey since 2018. His area of interest and specialty is in the relationship between media and culture, with a particular focus on Disability Studies.
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