Multimodal Response and Writing as Poetry Experience

What affordances do multimodal and digital information provide to the student and teacher with regard to responding to and writing poetry? This question juxtaposes one of the oldest literary genres in human history (i.e., poetry), with some of the newest technologies available. To enrich the content and effect as students experience poetry, technology may seem like an unwelcome stranger. Research has found, however, that “multimedia texts and multimodal composing may actually shift classroom culture toward a more learner-centered paradigm” (Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2003, pp. 381-382). This chapter explores the integration of technology with both response to poetry and authorship of poetic works as a means to enrich English classroom experiences. In the authors’ view, important work in this arena must not use technological tools for the sake of using technology in the classroom, but, rather, for the sake of enriching literary experiences. Ultimately, by connecting response, authorship, and multimodal technologies, the teaching of poetry may be enhanced by the teaching of 21st century literacy skills. Toward these ends, the authors share opportunities for intertwining multimodal text with the teaching of poetry to enrich literacy and literary experience in middle and high school classrooms.

Considering Design

Technology continues to change the possibilities for text creation within the classroom, promoting student engagement in multimodal text production. Such a shift requires corresponding shifts in assessment discourses, from a justification for assigning a particular grade to a reflection of both the students’ learning and intention. This chapter presents insights from classroom researchers as they engage in multimodal text creation with both elementary and secondary students, highlighting the tensions present in attempting multimodal text creation with students while attempting to adapt print-centric assessment models. This work suggests a needed move away from traditional assessment tools, such as rubrics, and an increased awareness on behalf of teachers in regards to the intentions of students within the multimodal text creation process.

Networked Compositional Ecologies

Based on a description of the built and networked ecologies of urban infrastructure, this chapter reflects on how the interdependent and interactive elements of multimodal composition can be productively understood metaphorically and practically as infrastructure. The argument advanced here is that this framing of multimodal composition provides an adaptive theoretical model adequately flexible to adjust to emergent communicative modes and technologies and move beyond advocacy and rationale to a description of how multimodal composition, regardless of the specific media deployed, develops particular kinds of deployments and effects. It further suggests how infrastructure can help define certain characteristics of the multimodal text, in particular: (1) the linkage of rhetorical elements, (2) the location of the text, (3) the capacity for nonlinearity, and (4) the affinity for transdisciplinary ways of knowing. This understanding suggests heuristic approaches to multimodal invention and design and finally the relationship between composition and committed and imaginative knowledge.

Multimodality in Action

In this chapter, the authors present two classroom portraits of a 5th and 9th grade classrooms as activity systems where teachers and learners are engaged in multimodal composing. In their analysis, they are most interested in how principles of design, affordances of modes, and multimodality become internalized as psychological tools that shape learning in the context of activity. The authors ask two research questions: What are the mediational artifacts (both ideal and material) in these activity settings? What does this reveal about multimodality as a socially situated process? Conclusions drawn from the two different cases lead the authors to suggest that multimodality must be carefully understood as part of an activity system.

Beyond Words

This review synthesizes and critically interprets the empirical research on adolescents’ multimodal composition practices across contexts. Along with presenting descriptive statistics characterizing the 76 studies reviewed (e.g., research designs, contexts, and types of multimodal products), qualitative coding revealed six main themes in research focusing on adolescents and multimodal composition. Sequenced according to prevalence, research has found that multimodal composition is: 1) engaging for adolescents, 2) a collaborative, social process, 3) particularly beneficial to “marginalized” adolescents, 4) involves overt instruction, 5) is scaffolded in a variety of ways, and 6) is a complex, recursive process. At a time when notions of composition are expanding—educators are trying to catch up and researchers have just begun to understand and theorize multimodal composition—this review offers a comprehensive look at what has been learned thus far and suggests implications for research and practice.

Transnational Preservice Teachers’ Literate Lives and Writing Pedagogy in a Digital Era

This chapter focuses on the experiences of Latin@ transnational preservice teachers as they detail their (bi)literate lives through multimodal texts, specifically digital timelines and literacy narratives. Using qualitative methods, the authors examine the ways in which the production of multimodal texts became the medium through which participants could reflect on their own literacy processes through reflection and sharing. Preservice teachers were also asked to discuss their understandings of writing pedagogy and how they envisioned their future classrooms. Most of the Latin@ participants reported multiple language use and a variety of contexts where they learned about literacies. In addition, the multimodal and digital aspects of the assignments assisted students in recalling memories, widening their views of what counts as literacy, and fostering more inclusive writing pedagogy. Providing future classroom teachers with opportunities for engaging in mulitimodal composing along with critical reflection has the potential to transform and disrupt dominant ideologies towards literacy practices and English language dominance. Understanding the complex literacy practices of preservice teachers may also lead to shaping the future of literacy instruction to better serve an increasingly multilingual, multicultural student population.

Writing Remixed

This case study describes the creation of a digital multimodal poem by Mara, a preservice English Education teacher at a large state namesake university located in the Southeastern United States. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives broadly and New Literacies Studies specifically (Gee, 2012; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; The New London Group, 1996), this study uses multimodal discourse analysis (Jewitt, 2006; Lemke, 1998; O’Halloran, 2009) as a tool to analyze how one preservice teacher’s multimodal composition affected her concept of new literacies. To investigate what Mara learned through the multimodal composing process, the authors analyze three sources of data: a) Mara’s multimodal composition, b) Mara’s written reflection about her composing practices written immediately after she had created her multimodal composition, and c) a ninety-minute interview with Mara using photo-elicitation techniques. Findings indicate that multimodal composing practices can potentially take advantage of the relation between cognition and affect, and do so using cultural means of codification that are both inscribed by textual authors and encoded by acculturated readers. Such experiences and affordances of electronic devices, a trend that is likely to grow as technology continues to advance and become pervasive in the lives of succeeding generations.

Examining 7th Graders’ Tablet-Created Screencasts to Promote Safe Driving

This study explores patterns emerging from 7th grade students’ digital multimodal compositions created in response to a service-learning project focused on safe driving. Through a descriptive content analysis of three case-study groups’ digital products, this chapter presents educators with tangible ideas of what the digital composition process can yield when students are offered multimodal tools for self-expression. Three themes, collaboration, experimentation, and choice, describe the classroom contexts that are supportive of students’ creation of digital screencasts. Findings suggest that collaboration engages students in a participatory culture that invites those students who may be less proficient with alphabetic writing but who have unique perspectives to share and rich ideas to communicate. This study stands as a useful starting point for guiding teachers toward ways to incorporate an expanded set of writing practices, including digital multimodal composition, that engage all students in finding their voice.

The Writing Process and Multimodal Composition

This chapter expands upon an interior monologue the author created during the experience of composing a comic strip for publication. Building on this reflection regarding the processes of composing in multimodal form and on the work of John Steiner (1997), four professional artists were interviewed using semi-structured interviews to get at the steps they take when writing multimodally. Categories of the data are uncovered and refined using the constant-comparative method. Some of these trends include: gaining knowledge through practice of a medium’s structure and affordances including the necessity of writing in nonlinear fashion and being able to write collaboratively. Implications for instruction are suggested.

Learning the Disciplinary Language and Literacies of Multimedia Composition

In this chapter, the authors describe four adolescent students’ participation in a digital video summer camp. They describe the students’ acquisition of moving-image composition strategies and how these processes are connected to acquiring new vocabulary. The authors examine the camp practices through a lens of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and use this perspective to guide data analysis. Through observations, interviews, and videos, they identify the various activity systems necessary to teach filmmaking, and use examples from one group to illustrate how boundary crossings shift expertise to students. The authors describe the following: (1) the “third space” (i.e., between counselor and student motives), (2) “networked space” (i.e., among different multiliteracy systems), and (3) “shifted spaces” where boundaries are not just crossed, but actually create a shift in expertise or perspective. The authors discover a mediated learning approach that helps students effectively use filmmakers’ words as tools. The camp structure is a model of apprenticeship into a discipline through its language and multiliteracies.