Welcome to our blog. In short, we hope this is a helpful and accessible tool for educators interested in incorporating multimodality into their classrooms. As fellow educators, we know that this can often be a daunting task, especially when faced with a wide array of students that have a diverse range of experiences and skill sets. As composition teachers we know that it is important to bring the technologies that our students use everyday into our classroom, but it is often difficult to know where to begin. This blog was made with that challenge in mind. We hope to offer you a number of useful, and easy-to-implement multimodal strategies that expand the meaning-making process in your classroom. We have presented classroom strategies here that incorporate: objects and writing spaces, comics, mood boards, video, and photo collage. Each one of these multimodal strategies can be used at various times in your students' composing process, and in combination with one another or separately. We have offered a wide range of ideas, applications and modifications so that you can adapt each strategy to your individual classroom needs and attempted to centralize resources so these lessons are easily navigated.
The theoretical framework we had in mind when creating this blog comes from Jody Shipka's book Toward a Composition Made Whole. Shipka acknowledges the layered and fragmented nature of composition when she writes, “…a composition is, at once, a thing with parts—with visual-verbal or multimodal aspects—the expression of relationships and, perhaps most importantly the result of complex, ongoing processes that are shaped by, and provide shape for, living” (17). We find this to be a useful frame around the different strategies and tools we have gathered in this blog. Shipka highlights the multiple reservoirs our students possess, and reminds us that it is important to draw upon them throughout the composition process. Shipka points out the immense potential new media text and computer technologies have to “‘bring us together in new ways,’ to ‘change the way students write, read and think,’ to ‘cultivate multiple literacies, to blur the writer/reader boundary and to broaden notions of ‘composing’” (9). We offer the strategies, moves, and lessons here in order to help you expand this attention to the visual in your classroom, and as a means to ‘broaden’ and ‘cultivate’ the notions of meaning and composing that our students possess.
