From Screen to Screen: Students’ Use of Popular Culture Genres in Multimodal Writing Assignments

As digital media have created the opportunity to compose multimodal texts, there has been growing attention paid to how best to define and teach genres such as videos or podcasts, to writing students. What has gone largely unexamined, however, is the influence of popular culture genres on students’ conceptions of and approaches to composing multimodal texts. Yet much of students’ engagement with texts outside the classroom revolves around popular culture, whether offline in the form of film and television or online with digital media such as online video and computer games. This essay explores, through student interviews and textual analysis, how student responses to multimodal assignments in college writing courses draw on popular culture genres, both explicitly and implicitly, in ways that students find unremarkable, but of which their instructors are often unaware. We must make productive use of the connections–and tensions–created when students’ employ their knowledge of popular culture genres for multimodal projects.