Ghosts of Multimodal Past, Present, and Future

Inter-modal transportation collage

I recently reviewed a book called Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy by Jason Palmeri. Among other things, the book made me think about what “multimodal” actually means, why it matters to teaching writing, and what we’re supposed to do with it moving forward.

One of the most important things I took away from it is that multimodal composition isn’t new. In fact, the idea of integrated non-alphabetic approaches to literacy in the composition classroom goes back several decades. What we are now exploring with digital video cameras and podcasts, our colleagues in the 1970s were exploring with Xerox machines, collages, and photographs. The core idea is the same: if our goal is to teach students to communicate and think critically, we should be using all the tools in the toolbox. Palmeri suggests that it is very narrow-minded of us to think of ourselves only as “writing” teachers. We are, in fact, teachers of composition, and that’s the process for which we are experts.

So where should we go from here? We certainly shouldn’t stop teaching writing. We aren’t so far advanced that writing is no longer the privileged form of discourse: it certainly still is. However, we should strive to open new avenues of process and expression for our students. Though a formal alphabetic composition may be most appropriate for some contexts, it isn’t for others, and we should not stifle students’ whose own rhetorical situation pushes them in a different direction. At the very least, we should encourage and nourish multimodality as a process for composition. Even if we want our students to be producing traditional written compositions as the end-goal, who’s to say that their process has to be likewise alphabetic? Technology affords our students new ways to enter into the conversation, whether that’s through dynamic digital mind-mapping (through something like Prezi) in the brainstorming process, or audio-recorded drafting, these “ways in” can ultimately help some students build confidence in expression that they would not ordinarily get from following our conventional “writing process.”

I’ll finish with a short video that Guy Krueger and I assembled at the Digital Media and Composition Institute at Ohio State this summer. In this video, Dr. Cynthia Selfe talks about why multimodality matters: to our students, to us, and to the larger enterprise of composition. One thing stands out to me: we should be encouraging our students to explore all available means of persuasion. Whether those means are a Xeroxed collage of images, a series of mini-podcasts, or an MLA-style essay, we need to keep our eyes on the fundamental rhetorical aim of our discipline.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TqLEl37CtQ]

3 thoughts on “Ghosts of Multimodal Past, Present, and Future

    • Author gravatar

      Interesting post, Andrew. I definitely liked how you claimed we were not just teachers of writing, but teachers of composition. This is definitely some food for thought.

    • Author gravatar

      I totally agree that students who don’t learn to express themselves in the most current modes are at a disadvantage. But, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in my day for me to learn these new techniques so that I can teach them. I’m late to technology. I’m learning little by little, but it’s slow going.

    • Author gravatar

      Your post explains why I so often refer to compositions that students create rather than the writing they create. Your comments along with Cindy Selfe’s also remind us that the landscape of composition need not necessarily be bound by physical location!

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