Embracing Multimodality

A few years ago if I had read Takayoshi’s and Selfe’s chapter “Thinking about Multimodality,” I would have thought to myself, “It’s a noble concept, including multiple mediums in a composition course, but it’s not for me.” I was so overwhelmed by videos, hyper-linking, and even internet classes that I would have shied away from teaching composition in a “non-traditional” format. According to Takayoshi and Selfe, the act of reformatting composition to include cultural practices and modern technology is not new (7). There will be those who are always intimidated and put-off by change, but, for educators, we owe it to our students to teach curriculums which are relevant to their lives. Rather than being distracting to the conventional “alphabetic” assignments, multimodality enriches the students’ overall understanding and application of analytical skills (5). A student-centered pedagogy, which I strongly value, demands that we frame assignments within students’ “own cultures and discourses” (5). When students can utilize what they enjoy doing outside of class with their course work along with preparing them for a technological-dependent society, they are more likely to be engaged and successful. Does this mean that instructors will need to put in extra time training themselves and developing new assignments and how to evaluate them? Well, of course, however, if the results are that students see composition as relevant rather than archaic, then the extra time is well spent.
No longer threatened by ever-changing technology, I began thinking of how our composition courses could adapt some of our existing assignments to make them even more multimodular. For instance, I thought about how the review essay could be expanded to include the actual song, movie, restaurant, etc. that is being reviewed. The song could be playing for the audience to hear while they are reading, or a video file of a commercial or trailer could be inserted within the text. Also, the research discourse community assignment lends itself to this type of expansion. Students could video their interviews and segments of their field research and link them right into their papers. I can see how this interaction with words and visual elements would only increase the students’ excitement about the projects.