American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program : Affiliate Faculty

Digital Humanities Program : Affiliate Faculty

Multimodal Working Group : Member

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, 4th edition

Writer/Designer

Michigan State University has been working to advance the common good in uncommon ways for more than 150 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU focuses its vast resources on creating solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

Michigan State University

In addition to the Karen L. Gillmor, Ph.D Endowed Professorship in Professional Writing, Kristin Arola is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures as well as Interim Chair of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at MSU.

Arola’s research and teaching focuses on composing as culturing. Specifically, she explores the act of writing/designing/making and the relations that bring forth these texts. By looking to the relations between land, histories, and cultures, she considers how the words, designs, and images we compose evoke the past while opening up possible futures. To do this work, she brings together composition theory, making culture, digital rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric.

American Indian Studies

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Inaugural endowed professor teaches how to connect writing with culture

Associate Professor

Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Digital Humanities

Dr. Arola explores the possibilities and perils of bringing indigenous perspectives to interdisciplinary work. She tells her story as a rhetorician, humanist, and Anishinaabekwe involved in an NSF Convergence Research project. The project, “Socio-Technological System Transitions: Michigan Community and Anishinaabe Renewable Energy Sovereignty” — which includes scientists, engineers, social-scientists, humanists, tribal nations, and community organizers — uses community-engaged research to collect and analyze local renewable energy risks, barriers and opportunities to help with decision making and future transitions to renewable energy systems. Dr. Arola offers strategies from an indigenous and humanist perspective for working on, developing, and sustaining respectful collaborations in such work.

2020 University Interdisciplinary Colloquium with Dr. Kristin Arola

Teachers of writing are conscientious evaluators of their students' written work, and the strategies for creating those grades vary widely, from providing formative or summative feedback and using heuristics or rubrics, among other methods. These assessment strategies can happen in many media, such as handwritten comments, typed summative and in-line comments, oral feedback (including audio recordings), and even screencast talk-throughs of student papers. But we are often asked, how does grading change when teachers are evaluating more than just the written content? With the spreading use of multimodal assignments in writing classes, this webinar will offer participants multiple perspectives and strategies for responding to multimodal student work, based in current writing studies research and combined-decades of experience teaching multimodal texts.

Strategies for Assessing Multimodal Projects Kristin Arola, Jennifer Sheppard, and Cheryl E. Ball

Kristin Arola

Michigan State University

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Inaugural endowed professor teaches how to connect writing with culture