[3] Because Canva is easy to learn and easy to use, its application in the classroom is valuable. Teachers can introduce the platform, have students register, and then start designing within ten minutes, and students can then work across a variety of genres with minimal technical guidance. Canva further provides a series of visual design workshops and lesson plans to support teachers who use Canva in the classroom. More so, Canva’s free account is not limited to a certain number of days or designs meaning that students can potentially work in Canva for years designing hundreds of texts without paying a dollar. When users are prompted to pay in the platform, á la carte upcharges are tied to the use of specific templates and images. These images are marked with dollar signs or labeled as “Pro” in the media bank.
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[4] In terms of device interface, Canva has the flexibility to operate through a web browser or app giving students the mobility to work across different internet-enabled devices. Because their designs are tied to an online account, the content similarly moves with students from one device to another. Another affordance of the platform is its sharability; not only can users share their designs when they are finished, but collaborative projects can be shared and asynchronously edited by multiple Canva accounts. My experiences in first-year and upper-level writing classrooms have shown Canva to be a platform that students consistently enjoy working with and something they often return to for major assignments. Moreover, I go to Canva frequently to design flyers for upcoming departmental events, create certificates and letterheads, prepare images for conference presentations, and design cover images for items like our teachers’ guide. Hence, Canva can be a useful space for both teachers and students to enact principles of design and compose across genres as illustrated in the demonstration video below.

Video Transcript

[5] In considering Canva’s limitations, few reside with the platform’s functionality as long as users have reliable internet access. In my own classroom, students use Canva in low-stakes classroom activities designing genres like movie posters and infographics. After being led through the design and sharing process in these low-stake activities, they then have the choice to return to Canva as a platform option for major projects. While many do choose to utilize Canva later on in the course, students rarely mention experiencing glitches in the designing, saving, or sharing processes. The few complaints I have heard regarding the platform connects to its need for constant, stable internet access.
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[6] With regards to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Canva has mixed reviews depending on the varying needs of individual students. In terms of increased access, the platform never relies on color alone to communicate function and has strong color contrast enabling users with different types of color blindness to differentiate tools and buttons without issue. Additionally, the company provides all design tutorials in full text (no video/audio media), and throughout these resources and the interface at large, there are no interrupting sounds or flashes. However, the interface is not controllable solely through the keyboard access, and the interface consistently demands high motor skill function as the user must be able to operate the cursor. More so, form errors make the page not compatible with screen readers although the screen can be magnified to 200% without disrupting the interface or content—but for those with more significant vision loss, the visual interface renders both the design process and the media bank inaccessible (meaning there are no textual descriptions of templates aside from titles). Language on the website is approachable to readers with varying levels of reading fluency and, although the default language is English, the interface can be translated into a number of other languages. Because Canva’s platform is not universally accessible, it is important that every student’s needs are considered before Canva is brought into the classroom.

[7] Another issue surrounding Canva’s use in the classroom is its ease of use which can encourage careless design. Admittedly, the first time I brought Canva into my classroom, students were too quick use the pre-made templates and relied on those templates far too heavily. Furthermore, as a teacher, I did not ask them to be accountable for transforming the templates they chose to work with. When students approach templates as if they are paint-by-number projects—by filling in the pre-made structures with their own words—the divide between content and form is further widened with form being rendered as an arhetorical choice for the student-designer (outside of that initial click). Kristin Arola mentions the dilemma of the template in her (2010) article “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template the Fall of Design.” Although she speaks on social media profile templates, her point that “composing texts, more specifically making choices about the composition of a page or screen, helps individuals think through the ways in which design functions to make meaning and produce selves” holds true for drag-and-drop design platforms like Canva (p. 7). If Canva is to be used in the classroom, then, it is important for teachers to have critical conversations about template use and design beforehand.

[8] Let me be clear in stating that the solution to this problem is not to scorn the template and force students to design from blank pages on the Canva platform. For one, templates exist in professional settings and can be helpful in observing generic conventions and seeing principles of effective design at work; thus, template-aversion will only keep students from understanding responsible template re-use later on in their academic and professional lives. Furthermore, even if students are forbidden to access templates on Canva, they are still designing with images, photos, colors, and fonts created by other designers. Finally, templates can be important conversational starting points in the classroom problematizing concepts like authorship, and re-use. Often, when our students fill in a template, they do not consider that they are sharing authorship with a nameless designer nor do they imagine how their ethos can be damaged if their audience comes across multiple texts with identical designs. Including these issues in our classroom conversations are important parts of supporting multiple literacies. In the remaining space of this tech review, then, I would like to offer approaches and strategies that encourage more rhetorically aware template use in the Canva interface.

[9] One way to approach template-based design is through the lens of assemblage. In “Plagiarism, Originality, and Assemblage,” Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber  define assemblages as “texts built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context” (2007, p. 381). However, students seldom realize that the images, fonts, and templates in a media bank operate under the same principles of assemblage. In “Assemblages of Ashbury Park: The Persistent Legacy of the Large-Letter Postcard,” Stephen McElroy writes that “we should enumerate and examine the texts, including the modes and media, from which the composer/assembler draws; the segments, pieces, elements, and components of those texts that he or she selects and uses in the assemblage…whether in print or digital” (2017, p. 172-173, emphasis added). With McElroy’s point in mind, helping students re-see multimodal design as assemblage, and re-see the kind of composing done on a platform like Canva as a process that is shaped by a number of nameless contributors and forces helps them to understand the ethical implications of overly relying on a pre-existing template and become more metacognitively aware of their design and its parts. Another strategy that encourages thoughtful design asks students to imagine and plan their design on paper before they access the media bank Canva provides. This method ensures that students enter the designing space working from an existing idea instead of letting the template be their design starting point. As well, after designing, teachers can ask students to create process or reflection documents wherein they articulate their process of assembled design and defend their choices; in that document, teachers might prompt them to list the different technologies and media that contributed to their final design. An example of one activity that attends to design process as assemblage is available in Appendix A. Problematizing a paint-by-numbers approach to template use will help students focus on design-awareness, responsible re-use, and assemblage as design in digital spaces like Canva.
  
[10] Ultimately, Canva is a user-friendly, affordable option for visual design. Its drag-and-drop design interface, media bank, and flexibility to work across devices makes it approachable for students and teachers new to design and digital composing. While bringing Canva into the classroom is potentially beneficial for helping students enact principles of design, it must be supported with conversations about template use and template-as-design and should include process documents so students are encouraged to think critically about the design choices they are making.