In recognition of the anxiety surrounding the lack of this kind of experience, researchers have begun to argue for the need for teachers and administrators to actively engage with the tools, mechanics, and rhetorics of digital production as teachers (Anderson; Ball; Rice; Sheppard) and as administrators (Day). It’s not enough to just think about these things. As Jenny Rice points out we need to be “willing to get under the hood” and move away from the ways in which we have stigmatized the mechanics of production:

we would do well to remember that mechanics allow users to operate a wider range of tools in order to imagine and enact what was not possible (or “working”) before. More than an instrumental knowledge of technology, rhetorical mechanics is the material practice of enactment. (373)

That material practice of enactment, then, is one of the best ways for teachers of writing to confront the personal anxieties that surround the idea of digital composing.

I arrived at my own, personal appreciation for both the levels of anxiety that learning to compose multimodally can cause and the ways in which doing the work itself can reduce those anxieties through my participation in the two-week Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) at The Ohio State University in June 2009. I consider myself a relatively tech-savvy and tech-interested teacher and researcher, so I was somewhat taken aback by the level of anxiety that the first few days at DMAC caused for me. I was in a continual state of panic at the thought of having to draw on some kind of design sense that I was sure I did not have. I felt stupid. I adopted the song “Fixing My Brain” as my DMAC theme song, with the lyrics "I've been thinking about fixing my brain, but I'm afraid I won't feel the same" running through my head at every turn as I tried hard to conceptualize producing my own multimodal work.

It turns out that I was not the only one at DMAC confronting fears related to moving out of the comfort zone of print. The video reflections of the experience by some of my fellow DMAC participants (Alanna, Lauren, Doug, Terri, and Trisha) illustrate the learning curve, or the anxiety curve, that we were all going through when confronted with pushing ourselves and being encouraged to experiment with multimodal composing. Their reflections on the first day of DMAC highlight what most of my DMAC co-conspirators, colleagues in various writing and rhetoric programs from across the country, and I were experiencing: high levels of anxiety at the thought of being asked to work with multiple modalities and new technological tools. The apprehension, whether mixed with the exhilaration of exploring fun new means of creative production, the frustration of just "not getting it," or the disgust of the uselessness of it all, was palpable across the board in the first two or three days of DMAC.

By day seven, however, halfway through the institute, a "tentative peace"(Alanna Frost Day 7) had settled in for most participants and by day thirteen, everyone had successfully composed audio, video, and multimodal research projects. The similar arc across the experiences of these teachers, with a wide range of technological know-how and experience (or lack thereof), as they learned to do the work of digital and multimodal composing is instructive on multiple levels and in multiple ways. It serves as an excellent reminder that fear and anxiety are part and parcel of learning experiences. That is an easy lesson to forget when we are doing things that we are comfortable with, like teaching and producing print texts, but a painfully obvious one when we are forced to stretch to accommodate new ways of thinking, communicating, and being in our professional lives.

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