Multimodal assignments have not always been so common on composition classroom syllabi; and this isn’t just because we haven’t had the technology. While students’ access to screens has exploded with computers, smart phones with cameras, tablets, social media, and visual image editing softwares, English departments haven’t always kept up. Many composition scholars have worked to establish digital media and rhetoric as deserving of classroom attention as a serious, valuable, and worthwhile method of teaching, learning, and composing (Shipka; The New London Group; Yancey; Palermi; George; Wardle;).
Today, more than ever before, composition classes are including multimodal and digital assignments on the syllabus (Selfe; Bezemer and Kress; The New London Group; Palmeri; Lauer; Eyman). The increasing prevalence of assignments that both encourage and utilize the digital literacy of composition students reinforces the idea that, like so many have said (Selfe; Shipka; Palmeri; George; Yancey; Alexander), multimodality and digital literacy is valuable at the college level. Encouraging students to utilize the digital literacy they use every day on screens everywhere outside of the classroom allows them to analyze the digital media they consume every day critically and improve their own digital composition processes to help them create meaningful, digital content in an ever-growing digital world. These multimodal assignments generally stand out on a syllabus made primarily of more “traditional” assignments encourage students to be creative and have fun with an assignment that incorporates digital, visual, and auditory elements.
Digital Multimodality and Composition
-
What do we think about
when we think about
DIGITAL MULTIMODALITY?
-
Multimodality is, simply, the use of multiple modes – like images, audio, text, and design – to make meaning in a single text. By combining different modes in one text composers are able to access different ways to present their ideas. Gunther and Kress define a mode as a "a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning” (171).
For something to be "digital multimodality," it must appear on a screen and use digital modes - like image, audio, links, and text - to make meaning.
-
We often use digital multimodality in the composition classroom with assignments like...
-
ePortfolios and Blogs
-
Essays With Photos, Charts, and Diagrams
-
Podcasts
-
Mini Documentaries on iMovie
Composition "has always already been multimodal."
As Jason Palmeri reminds us in Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing, composition “has always already been multimodal.” Composition – as a process, conversation, and literacy practice – has always been multimodal and has always sought to “help students draw connections between writing, image making, speaking, and listening” as a field. Even the most traditional of alphabetic texts, like the page of a book, is multimodal. The font, margins, colors, and overall design of the page each serve as individual modes that contribute to the final text’s main idea and the way the reader interprets that idea.
We
havehad a moment.
Diana George, in her 2002 article “From Analysis to Design,” investigated the absence of multimodal composition in writing classrooms even when it was commonly acknowledged that composition of an untraditional kind is a necessary skill. George explained that there was still confusion surrounding visual communication and “whether it belong[ed] in the composition course” and, because of this, visual methods of composing were often seen as a “dumbing down” of composition and “problematic” to fit into courses (13, 19). At best, if included, visual assignments often are only “peripheral” or even an “anomaly” amongst the other course work and require the student to analyze them using the written word as opposed to engaging with them visually (13).
George argued that the hesitation of instructors to bring new modes of composing into the classroom was limiting the types of assignments that could be incorporated. A composition class should not be limited to textual analysis, but should instead welcome design of all modes. Two years later, Kathleen Yancey, in her article “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” claimed that English departments everywhere “have had a moment.” Departments could continue to teach just oral and written literacy, or we choose to incorporate the literacy of the screen. Yancey claimed that, within that moment, a tipping point, we needed to develop a new curriculum for composition that fully integrated technological literacy into the classroom.
And, scholars responded…
And, in a lot of ways, we ceased that moment. Just a year after Yancey told English Departments ever to step up their multimodal game, Jody Shipka published an article detailing how to incorporate multimodal frameworks into composition classrooms. And, not long after that, Cynthia Selfe and Pamela Takayoshi argued that “teaching multimodality is one pathway to accomplishing long-valued pedgagogical goals” and provided positive teacher testimonials regarding multimodal assignments. And, many more scholars followed.
Today, many composition classrooms include digital assignments often designed as multimodal that help encourage students to explore different modes and methods of communicating their ideas and responding to classroom content. Enough departments have begun using digital literacy and composing in the classroom that scholars, like Douglas Eyman, have been able to build the discipline. In his interactive digital book with highlight and comment features, Eyman establishes “digital rhetoric” as an interdisciplinary, but no less substantial, field that requires specific skills and literacies with the visual and digital. Eyman argues that digital rhetoric is “most simply defined as the application of rhetorical theory (as analytic method or heuristic for production) to digital texts and performances.” Eyman explains that whether we adapt and revise traditional rhetorical theories, or build entirely new ones to apply to digital rhetoric specifically, digital texts and performances are deserving of a robust analysis through rhetorical theory.
In other words, digital rhetoric is its own thing.
Digital multimodality is challenging our rhetorical and pedagogical frameworks and a lot of scholars have shifted traditional rhetorical frameworks to apply to digital texts. Ryan Shepherd explains the different literacies readers use on Facebook and Erin Brock Carlson, Amber Buck, and Lilian Mina offer ways to use rhetorical analysis with social media and offer assignments to help students apply analytical skills to digital media. Kendra Andrews offers visual “sketchnoting” as a tool to help students work and re-work their composition process while Ben Harley explains the rhetorical importance of sound in an auditory essay.