Multimodality in the Composition Classroom

In "Thinking about Multimodality," Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe suggest a new sort of composition that extends its focus beyond the written text to include audio, video, still images, and digital media. They address many fears that they anticipate teachers might experience, such as a concern that they will have to juggle the responsibilities of both a technology teacher and a composition teacher, and that this new focus on multiple forms of media in assignments will cause students' ability to mastery of the crucial written mode of communication to suffer. But Takayoshi and Selfe ultimately decide that the possible rewards outweigh the risks, as the growing importance of new technologically-based forms of communication necessitate new types of student fluency. In our own composition classes, we have already taken strides towards addressing multimodality in composition. In Composition 101, we require students to integrate still images into their personal narratives. And in Composition 102, Blackboard allows us to easily integrate audio and video texts into our required reading lists. What I hope to do in future courses I teach is to further integrate multiple modes of composition into student assignments.

This semester, I've included multiple modes of texts for my students to read, requiring them to watch a film version of "There Will Come Soft Rains" and comparing how the medium of film presents the content of the short story in a completely different manner, how it allows the author to do things that the original author, Ray Bradbury, was not able to do in a purely textual medium. I've also included audio texts in my syllabus. When focusing on musicians as a discourse community and how they write about technology, I played for my students some examples of mash-ups, a form that Philip Gunderson describes as "the New Age of Composition." Allowing students to experience additional media beyond text gives them the chance to better comprehend what Gunderson means when he coins this term.

What I've yet to do is actually integrate multimodality into my students' assignments. One of the things I'm considering for next time I teach Composition 102 is the inclusion of a wiki page and possibly a Facebook page into class instruction. In addition to musicians, another discourse community that we focused on this semester is educators. We read an article about the uses of Myspace and Facebook, as well as another article about the use of technology in the classroom. I think it might be beneficial to help students understand these articles by experiencing firsthand how webpages such as Facebook or wiki pages can be useful in the classroom for allowing students and teachers to keep in touch and share multimedia resources.

Introducing multimodality into the Composition classroom is a gradual process. Many of the concerns Takayoshi and Selfe discuss in their article are apprehensions that I share. Preparing classroom syllabi and lessons is already a time consuming process, and attempting to integrate additional resources and technologies into the classroom will only add to the amount of time spent in preparation. Furthermore, merely deciding how to integrate these additional resources in a truly profitable manner is another challenge. Nevertheless, the instances in which I've introduced multimedia resources into the classroom have proven to be among the most rewarding for both the students and myself, and I would love to continue to do so in the future, and in particular I would like to devise ways to have the students participate in the creation of multimodal forms of composition rather than merely experiencing them.

Technology and the Accumulation of Literacy

In "Accumulating Literacy," Deborah Brandt discusses, among other things, "the enduring power of dominant classes to define language standards" and "[...] the emerging power of a highly educated, technocratic elite [...]" (659). In the story of Sam May, she describes how his literacy advanced through the years, and how it was affected, in particular, by new technologies such as radio and television. This narrative is relevant to our classrooms, because new technologies, particularly the internet, are having a profound impact on our students' abilities to acquire literacy. And while Brandt's claim that the dominant classes can use these new technologies to control literacy is interesting, it's also true that technology, particularly access or lack of access to it, can be used to limit literacy. This ability to control access to literacy promotes and protects an already established class structure by limiting upward mobility through education.

This aspect of Brandt's essay struck me as most interesting because this semester one of my students is an alumnus from the K-12 school at which I taught for several years in the early 00's. I taught this student in both seventh and eighth grade, and while he excelled among his peers, he's now struggling within my classroom. He told me that he's one of only three students from his graduating class that managed to make it into college. But one of the concerns he has expressed to me is an unfamiliarity with the technologies that play a role in college academics. This concern is especially relevant, since the theme of my course is technology. In particular, this student has struggled with Blackboard because he's relatively unfamiliar with internet usage and web browsers.

My student's lack of familiarity with web browsers and the internet represents how the limiting of the proliferation of technology can be used to maintain a regimented class system. In Tchula, Mississippi, where this student attended school, there was no widespread broadband access as recently as five years ago, when I taught there. While the school where I taught had internet access, it only worked sporadically, and very slowly when it did work. Almost none of my students had internet access at home; some of them didn't always have electricity. The fact that the internet has become such a crucial piece of educational technology in the classroom ensures that people and places with limited broadband access - primarily people from lower economic classes - will remain firmly placed in the social tier they currently inhabitant.

The fact that the student in question was able to escape Tchula and attend college at all suggests that the possibility to achieve literacy despite the limitation of technology still exists. However, now that the educational environment has become a technocracy, individuals who are not proficient with modern technology in general and the internet in particular will find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring literacy in today's educational climate.

Someone Tell Me, Please, How Do I Make My Students Care?

In "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy," the authors discuss how performance can play a role in the writing process. In particular, they draw a distinction between writing done for the classroom and writing done for oneself. To elaborate on this distinction, they summarize I. A. Richards's notion of "inter-animation of words," which states that the meanings of words and text can shift depending not only on "their context within a sentence, but also [...] given their embodied context and their physical location in the world" (228). Context is all important in the creation of a text, as illustrated by the performative writings of Beth McGregor and Mark Otuteye, cited at the end of the essay. When students write texts outside of class - journal entries, notes for a debate, song lyrics, or what have you - they generally have more invested in the writing, and are less likely to see it as busy work. The challenge, then, for us as teachers is to make our assignments seem less like busy work and more like texts in which students should take a vested interest.

Merely turning classroom writing into an opportunity for performance art is not enough to achieve this task. We have given students opportunities both this semester and last to turn text into performance: group workshopping of assignments has an element of performance, as do the facilitation groups that students were required to take part in in English 101. In many instances, however, the performative element of these assignments did not make students any more interested than they normally would've been. As with any other assignment, they saw these things as hurdles they had to leap over in order to get the grade they wanted in class. In the worst instances, students became self-conscious, fumbled the ball in front of their peers, and ended up feeling embarrassed and humiliated.

The trick, then, is not merely to turn all writing assignments into performances, but to find some method of tying the assignments to the sort of writing (performative or personal) in which students are interested. This challenge is one that I'm currently facing in my classroom. In response to one of my decompression questions for paper 2, "What do you wish I as the instructor had more adequately explained in class," two students replied that they didn't see the point of the assignment, that it seemed to them like busy work and they weren't sure what I was expecting. My knee-jerk reaction was to place the onus on them: if they had such a relevant question, why did they not bother to ask it in class, after class, during office hours, or in an email? And while part of the responsibility for getting an answer to such a question is theirs, I'm also interested in figuring out how to convey to students the idea that the papers we have them write aren't just busy work. I've related to them in class the idea that learning how various discourse communities approach writing will help them understand how discourse communities they're a member of approach writing. I've related to them that critically analyzing the rhetorical choices that other writers make will help them make similar rhetorical choices in their own writing. But these things, of course, sound abstract at best to a freshman college student and ridiculous at worst.

While this essay raises some interesting ideas, I am still left with the question of how (and whether it would even be helpful) to integrate performance into the classroom in a way that is meaningful to students. And, perhaps more importantly, I'm always interested in finding ways to develop in my students a vested interest in completing their assignments beyond the authoritarian "You'll do it if you want to pass this class" or the abstract "In the future it'll help you analyze the texts you're actually interested in." If anyone has an answer, I'm all ears.