Multimodal Peer Review Poster for the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Tampa, Florida.

1. 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