folklore and multimodality

As a folklore grad student, I know relatively little about composition theory compared to the rest of the group, I think...but I am very excited about how what I learn during this workshop can inform my understanding of folklore and help make the field more engaging for my students. I mentioned this in my mini-interview today, but I find it interesting to think about how as a folklore instructor, I urge my students in their analyses of narrative performances (telling jokes or contemporary legends, for example) to pay attention to the meaning-making parctices that extend beyond language. I'll show my students a video-recording of a performance in context and then show them a transcript of just the words and ask them to point out what gets "lost" when the performance makes its way onto the written page (things like volume, pitch, accents, whether people are standing or sitting in relation to one another). When I send students out to audio and/or video record such performances in their own fieldwork projects, I ask them to think about these "textural" aspects of such performances when they ultimately generate their analyses. With all this focus I put on paying close attention to the multimodal aspects of performance, those communicative features that extend beyond the realm of language, it is a bit funny to think about how I ask them ultimately to explain the meaning of these elements in an 8-10 page paper. It will be a fun exercise in this class to think of assignments that allow for alternative modes of composition in my folklore classes.