As a researcher, my work is situated within new media writing, which concerns itself primarily with understanding meaning-making using textual and visual means with or without a computer. An example from new media writing not requiring a computer is comic books. Comics represent a narrative genre that combines text and image within panels and its stories consist of those panels in a sequential order. Most comics are produced using creative teams involving at least one writer and one artist, but its most important participant is the reader, who interprets panels and pieces together an otherwise incomplete narrative through interacting with its panels by reading them using reading conventions familiar to our Western culture. My original research with comics approached them as a literary genre and presented arguments about them with literacy in mind, but then comics appeared as a text and my previous experiences with literature and literary theory assisted me with understanding what may be gained from reading comics. However, once I approach comics and other new media genres such as video games using rhetoric and composition, then my work concerns itself with understanding how meaning happens rather than being concerned about what meanings are possible.
The research I am currently pursuing continues discussions from my dissertation and calls attention to common composition pedagogy problems college writing teachers experience with their students and offers solutions based on new media writing theories and practices combined with understanding how students learn from playing video games. The intersection between composition pedagogy and gaming is important to me because learning models and assessment practices featured within video games are able to inform our own teaching and writing assessment methods. Approaching gaming as a social practice from a critical perspective offers us opportunities to de-mystify processes involved with college writing, but only if we are able to reveal similarities between gaming and writing as a starting point. I believe much more work is possible at that intersection. For example, I imagine pursuing future projects and writing about topics such as how video games are rhetorical through genre and conventions associated with different gaming genres. I also imagine discussing how different actions gamers perform represent directed self-placement and its implications for creating a positive feedback loop while video games continuously assess players’ performance. The possibilities with my research are immense and I fully intend to exhaust as many of them as possible over my career.
