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.