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The integration of multimodal composition pedagogies into the secondary English curriculum may seem to some just another box to check on their already lengthy educational "to do" list. However, secondary English educators, prepared to multi-task their way through spelling, vocabulary, grammar, literature, and writing lessons may discover that multimodal composition pedagogies can actually enhance instruction while at the same time meet curricular standards. For example, in the state of Ohio, English educators must focus student instruction to elements of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading processes and applications, writing processes and applications, writing conventions, research, and communication (ODE, 2002). Most particularly, the communication strand includes elements of aural and visual literacy--both which could be readily met in multimodal composition assignments where students are encouraged to "grow" their texts beyond traditional print boundaries.
Furthermore, the creation of multimodal texts incorporates the bandwidth of standards mentioned in Ohio's English Language Arts Code. In multimodal compositions students must still utilize appropriate writing processes, applications, and conventions. Likewise, multimodal composing assignments may also include research, target vocabulary use, and foster good reading habits--it is all in the assignment's design. As Cindy Selfe argues, the incorporation of multimodal assignments does not mean the death of traditional writing assignments, instead multimodal composing affords the opportunity for various elements of English instruction to combine in one space and perhaps serve more than one purpose. She writes that teachers should "respect and encourage students to deploy multiple modalities in skillful ways--written, aural, visual" because of the "various roles each modality can play in human expression, the formation of individual and group identity, and meaning making" (Selfe, forthcoming, p. 9).
And what is more important in education than meaning making? In "A Pedagogy of Mulitiliteracies," The New London Group (1996) proposes that "[w]hen learners juxtapose different languages, discourses, styles, and approaches, they gain substantively in metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities and in their ability to reflect critically on complex systems and their interactions." Elizabeth Daly argues, too, that media creators and scholars "do not give primacy to print", since "images and sounds, integrated in a time-based medium, can be as important in creating knowledge and communicating ideas and information as text" (2003, p. 34). Thus, multimodal pedagogies--pedagogies that encourage students to juxtapose color, text, visual images, sound or music, and written or spoken word--serve as complex systems in which students are cognitively and "linguistically challenged as they strive to make and interpret meaning. As a result, English classrooms imbued with such diverse possibilities "open up that learning space so that all students have room to express themselves" (Selfe, forthcoming, p.10).
For Dr. Cindy Selfe's and pre-service teacher Kelsey MacDonald's views, play the videos to the right of the screen.
