In this interview, David Sheridan shares what he has learned during his 2000-2003 efforts to build a Multiliteracy Center within the University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center. He provides us the realistic views and visionary arguments we might need to garner support and funding for building a Multiliteracy Center at our individual institutions. He also speaks candidly about the key challenges of directing such an endeavor in order to help us recognize possible obstacles and overcome them.
The interview's three sections delineate areas of focus for those interested in designing and directing such a center. In "Building," Sheridan provides his thoughts on the practical foundations for setting up the center; in "Multiliteracy," he refines definitions and arguments for developing a multiliterate citizenry; in "Center," he illustrates the support that a course can receive from a Multiliteracy Center integrating the foundations and philosophy set forth in the first two sections.
David M. Sheridan's interest in the intersection of writing centers and technology stems from working as a graduate student at Michigan State University's writing center, which has supported new media authoring for some time. After completing his Ph.D., he took a three-year lecturer position at University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center. He is now back at Michigan State University as the associate director of the Writing Center. In addition to writing centers, he is interested in signifying practices associated with the city of Detroit, including the way new technologies enable multimodal discourses of resistance.
"What
it would mean to be educated in the twenty-first century would be, in
part, to be able to communicate effectively using digital technologies.
And that that, in turn, would mean that marginalized groups and community
groups would use multimodal digital rhetoric to effectively represent
their own images and needs and effectively advocate for the kind of
social structures that they believe appropriate for a culture to adopt."