Multimodal Composing in Classrooms

Learning and Teaching for the Digital World

Suzanne M. Miller, Mary B. McVee, Suzanne M. Miller, Mary B. McVee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415897488
• eBook ISBN: 9781136637797
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking a close look at multimodal composing as an essential new literacy in schools, this volume draws from contextualized case studies across educational contexts to provide detailed portraits of teachers and students at work in classrooms. Authors elaborate key issues in transforming classrooms with student multimodal composing, including changes in teachers, teaching, and learning. Six action principles for teaching for embodied learning through multimodal composing are presented and explained.

The rich illustrations of practice encourage both discussion of practical challenges and dilemmas and conceptualization beyond the specific cases. Historically, issues in New Literacy Studies, multimodality, new literacies, and multiliteracies have primarily been addressed theoretically, promoting a shift in educators' thinking about what constitutes literacy teaching and learning in a world no longer bounded by print text only. Such theory is necessary (and beneficial for re-thinking practices). What Multimodal Composing in Classrooms contributes to this scholarship are the voices of teachers and students talking about changing practices in real classrooms.

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Multimodal Composing

The Essential 21st Century Literacy

Suzanne M. Miller and Mary B. McVee

A pre-service teacher downloads an image of Spiderman to her multimedia composition to make a pointed contrast with Walt Whitman’s line of poetry and to build a metaphor about her life identity (www.multimodalpoetry.org). A pair of fifth graders consider how to use color and sounds to represent their knowledge about the environment and how acidic water in ecological systems affects living things. In an urban classroom, two 11th graders, Paige and Nicole, import the haunting song “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday onto the sound track of their movie trailer about Jim Crow Laws while they discuss whether National Archives images of lynching victims are too gruesome for the audience (http://gse.buffalo.edu/org/cityvoices/festmov/featured.php).

All of these students are engaged intently in making sense of the world and the curriculum through multimodal composing. In this book we tell the stories of these and other teachers and students engaging in such multimodal literacy through digital composing. Our purpose is to provide visions of classrooms where such new literacies become new tools for understanding and learning in school.

Why Multimodal Literacy?

Over the past 20 years, the idea of literacy has changed dramatically. The typical idea about literacy as reading and writing print text has expanded into multimodal literacy, which includes reading and writing multiple forms of nonprint “texts” such as images, web pages, and movies. Through producing and interpreting print, nonprint, and print-mixed representations in the digital world, people have developed new social literacy practices. Daily life now often includes use of Internet Web pages with images, voices, and music mixed with print. It is clear that in 21st-century social and cultural contexts, meanings are more and more represented multimodally—with images, sounds, space, and movement representing and communicating meaning (Kress, 2010).

How did such a revolution happen? As a “once in several centuries” innovation (Simon in diSessa, 2000, p. 3), the computer has been transforming our world and shaping new ways of making and using texts. Computer-based digital technologies provide new (and quick) access to these multiple modes of representation. The resulting digital world has influenced how all of us work, think, and live, creating a “new landscape of communication” (Kress, 2000, p. 183) marked by images at the center of our everyday experiences. Images are unlike print language; they are composed and need to be “read” with nonlinear logic. Arguing for an urgent change in school curriculum, Kress (2003) explains that language is a time-based, sequentially organized mode, while images are space-based and simultaneously organized; competence with mixing these modes involves design. Facility with design—the process of orchestrating representational modes and their interconnection—is therefore vital for composing a text that can meet the communication demands of new and future multimodal environments: “Design refers to how people make use of the resources that are available at a given moment in a specific communicational environment to realize their interests as makers of a message/text” (Jewitt & Kress, 2003, p. 17). As many texts are now widely created through images mixed with print and other modes or means of representation, the literacy practices needed for functioning in the world have been and still are rapidly transforming (Kress, 2010; Leu, 2002; McVee, Bailey, & Shanahan, 2008a; Miller, 2008; Miller & Borowicz, 2005).

This change is particularly significant for our students, who have grown up surrounded and shaped by literacy practices related to computers, the Internet, mobile phones and other ubiquitous computing devices for communicating, taking pictures and video, playing music and games, searching for and storing digital material. As a substantial part of youth culture, these everyday tools and texts bind children and adolescents in a social culture through continual communication and meaning making. Increasingly, the millennial generation (born after 1981) immersed in popular and online cultures, thinks of messages and meanings multimodally, rarely in terms of printed words alone.

Professional literacy organizations have concluded that such new literacies are essential to 21st-century learning (e.g., International Reading Association [IRA], 2001; National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE], 2003, 2008). One consensus policy statement (Conference on English Education [CEE], 2005) helpfully takes up these issues: It argues that multimodal literacies yield composed products that are “legitimate and effective” with the potential to be “more dynamic, interactive, generative, exploratory, visual and collaborative” than print alone. This statement emphasizes the importance of providing opportunities for students to engage in multimodal composing in school. For one reason, an expanded notion of text can provide them with opportunities “to reinvent and enhance notions of audience, purpose, genre, form, and context”—mainstays of the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum—through multimodality. This book is grounded in the view of multimodal composing as a design-based means of both communicating and coming-to-know.

Throughout the chapters, we invite you to consider such changes in classrooms and to experience those changes in stories of teachers and students. Even in restrictive contexts of high stakes testing, teachers are introducing students to multimodal composing with a variety of outcomes that have included new levels of student engagement, content learning, and conceptual understanding. We turn first to the kinds of changes that teachers have made in their understanding of literacy and knowing in an effort to transform their teaching towards students’ multimodal composing.

What Counts as Literacy and Knowing?

One important consequence of the intense abundance of knowledge in the digital age is the transformation of what counts as knowing (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, 2006). The status of knowledge that already “exists” in statements (propositional knowledge) has changed: with the superabundance of digitally accessible information, no one can “know” all there is of importance to know in the world (e.g., currently the indexed web has almost 16 billion pages)! What has become essential is performance knowledge—knowing how to find, gather, use, communicate, and imagine new ways of envisioning assemblages of knowledge.

This dramatic change to “knowing as an ability to perform” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, p. 173) reflects a rethinking of what it means to know in an age where evolving social practices are aimed at gaining attention to one’s point of view on collected resources. These “practices of knowing…. reflect a range of strategies for assembling, editing, processing, receiving, sending, and working on information and data to transform diverse resources of ‘digitalia’ into ‘things that work’” (p. 173)—that is, composing new digital resources and multimodal texts with representational meaning and communicative purpose.

The ability to design such texts using multimodal resources to represent knowledge and communicate it for a purpose is now required for civic, personal, and workplace lives. For example, in creating flyers, signs, social network pages, videos, and other online content, images and print work together, often with other modes. Color, size, typeface, direction, spacing, movement, music, and other aspects of design represent and carry meaning. In digital practices outside of school, youth actively compose meaning through these new kinds of digital texts in their social worlds (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005). At the same time, in school, a declining percentage of graduating high school seniors (nationally only 28%) find what they do in classrooms meaningful and useful to their lives or futures (Bachman, Johnston, & O’Malley, 2008). These two intersecting 21st-century trends provide a stark image of changes we need to make in schools. Critiques of existing schooling point to the “more compelling and motivating” multimodal learning that students engage in outside of school (Gee, 2004) as an explanation for the increasing student disengagement in classrooms. Attention to this issue is central to the New Literacies Studies, which focus on these new kinds and uses of texts. Interdisciplinary educators and educational organizations agree that traditional schooling and literacy are not adequately preparing students for the 21st-century public, private, and workplace spheres (e.g., IRA, 2001; Kalantzis & Cope, 2008; NCTE, 2008; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2006).

There is general agreement, too, that the work educators and scholars are pursuing under the umbrella of New Literacies Studies is diverse, meaning many things to different educators (cf., Albers & Harste, 2007; Baker, 2010; Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, 2006; Mills, 2010; Pahl & Rowsell, 2006). Varying approaches are essential to move the field toward a better understanding of the role of new and emerging digital technologies in teaching and learning. Next, we briefly situate this book in relation to work of others in the field in terms of theory, context, and participants.

How this Book Fits into New Literacies

The landmark publication of the Handbook of New Literacies demonstrates the importance of new literacies to the field. It also reflects that much new literacies research has focused on Internet-based technologies. To date, the majority of that work has been in reading and comprehension (e.g., Coiro et al., 2008), with much less work focused on interactive and composing processes. Given this prevailing focus, there is a need to explore the constructive and socially situated nature of meaning making related to the new literacies involved in composing with digital technologies.

Despite recent attention to digital literacies the literacy “field has tended to focus upon the individual(s) versus group(s) as the meaning makers” (Tierney, 2008, cited in Alvermann, 2009, p. 23). In contrast, the new literacies focus on the socially situated nature of literacies as an important aspect of meaning. Lankshear and Knobel (2003, 2006) draw from Gee and others who observe that “the focus of learning and education is not children, nor schools, but human lives seen as trajectories through multiple social practices in various social institutions. If learning is to be efficacious, then what a child or adult does now as a learner must be connected in meaningful and motivated ways with ‘mature’ (insider) versions of related social practices” (Gee et al. 1996, as cited in Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, p. 48, italics in original).

Other studies have investigated these social practices, particularly among adolescents in out-of-school contexts (e.g., Alvermann, 2002; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Hull & Schultz, 2001; Lewis & Fabos, 2005) or in relation to the influences of media on youth in general (e.g., Ito et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2009). While we agree with Alvermann and Eakle (2007) who have described the in-school/ out-of-school binary as overly simplistic and unrepresentative of the fluidity of 21st century digital lives, there is still a need to document the learning and experiences of a broader range of students in school settings. In particular, the field needs to systematically explore student and teacher learning in socially situated group contexts where emphasis is not placed solely on individualized portrayals of learning. To address shortcomings in the field, we focus on socially situated multimodal composition in a variety of school contexts, exploring the use of digital, multimodal meaning making in elementary and middle grades, high schools, and university settings with a focus on the co-construction of knowledge.

In addition, it is not enough to merely document what teachers do or do not do in their classrooms. There are portraits in research and practice of teachers integrating Information Communication Technologies (ICT’s) into their classrooms (e.g., Shanahan, 2006; Watts-Taffe & Gwinn, 2007); for teachers in these works, the focus is on technology integration rather than on new literacies embedded in social practices or the affordances of multimodal composing for teachers and learners. Others (e.g., Kist, 2004) have presented negative-case examples to demonstrate that teachers sometimes suggest they are doing new literacies, but it is just traditional school practice made over with a bit of gloss and glitter. There is a handful of work where practitioners and researchers have attempted to describe new literacies pedagogy in practice from a teacher’s viewpoint, a learner’s viewpoint or from both (e.g., Albers, 2006; Bailey, 2009; McVee, Bailey, & Shanahan, 2008b; Miller, 2007, 2008, 2010a; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005). However, there are, to date, still too few portraits of teachers engaged in new literacies practices, particularly those related to multimodality, and, at the same time, still too few portraits of students engaging in literacy learning through such socially situated multimodal practices in schools.

In all, our aim in this text is to contribute to the ongoing work in the area of new literacies in three important ways. We explore the socially situated nature of pedagogical practice by teachers and teacher educators and the participatory and socially situated learning of grades 5–12 students and preservice and inservice teachers. We present actual portraits from teaching and learning in school settings, often nested within larger research projects. In particular, we focus on the composition of multimodal texts in a range of school settings—from elementary children to inservice teachers enrolled in a graduate program. In so doing, we seek to explore the affordances and limitations of multimodal composing for 21st-century teachers and students and to extend new literacies research and practice in areas of significant need (e.g., see Tierney, 2009). To better understand the influences of teachers’ attempts to include new literacies, we also address Moje’s (2009) call for research documenting outcomes of new literacy practices in school, particularly how youth feel, if they are more engaged in classrooms, and what youth learn about content, about literacy practices, and about their identities and positions in the world.

Looking across the chapters in the book, we conclude that integrating the dramatic broadening of purposeful literacies and practices of knowing to include multimodal meaning-making systems beyond printed text for all students may be the essential task for schools in the 21st century (Miller & Borowicz, 2006).

The Promise and Problems of Multimodal Composing

The multimodal meaning-making systems available in digital multimedia texts include vast potential for designing linguistic, visual, gestural, audio, and spatial elements dynamically to communicate (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 26). Yet reviews of research illustrate a recurring problem with teachers’ uses of digital...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Multimodal Composing: The Essential 21st Century Literacy
• 2. The (Artful) Deception of Technology Integration and the Move Toward a New Literacies Mindset
• 3. Learning Video Grammar: A Multimodal Approach to Reading and Writing Video Texts
• 4. The Importance of a New Literacies Stance in Teaching English Language Arts
• 5. “Being Great for Something”: Composing Music Videos in a High School English Class
• 6. Engaging Literature Through Digital Video Composing: A Teacher’s Journey to “Meaning that Matters”
• 7. Lessons in Multimodal Composition from a Fifth-Grade Classroom
• 8. A Literacy Pedagogy for Multimodal Composing: Transforming Learning and Teaching
• 9. Changing the Game: Teaching for Embodied Learning through Multimodal Composing
• About the Contributors
• Contributing Editors
• Index