It's More Than Just Words: The Case For a Multimodal Approach

Casanova T.L. Green, MFA Director of First Year Experience, Diversity, and Inclusion Hocking College

Casanova T.L. Green, MFA Director of First Year Experience, Diversity, and Inclusion Hocking College

Teaching and learning have changed drastically over the past thirty years. During my lifetime, the classroom experience has shifted from dial-up internet, playing Oregon Trail and learning how to type using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and printing papers from a dot-matrix printer to submitting work online, having plagiarism and AI detectors, and using your phone to completely type a paper.

In my field of expertise, English, I have seen a great shift from what I experienced as a learner and many expect from the English classroom today. People still believe that English class is just about writing good essays and that the instructor is the all-powerful gatekeeper of grammar and conventions who ensures only the elite who fit the “standard” do not feel the lashes of the red pen. However, the field is shifting as well as the needs of the world around us are shifting. Teaching, learning, and communication as a whole are becoming more dynamic by the hour. Our students are working in spaces that engage multiple senses and give them opportunities to disseminate information in new and needed ways. As we move towards a purely online experience, we must begin to embrace multimodality as a method of student composition.

Multimodality or multimodal composition is using multiple modes– sound, visual, touch, motion, space, and others– in one medium persuasively or to communicate a message. For many students and professionals, writing is an anxiety-inducing experience because they believe that they are bad writers or just cannot write altogether. One of my mentors, Dr. Ryan Shepherd who is the Director of First-Year Composition at Northern Illinois University says “There is no such thing as a bad writer overall. They are just not fluent in a certain genre of writing but are strong in others.” There are students who may not be able to write a scholarly academic paper but have 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or X, which is not an easy feat. You may have students who are able to convey the same research required in a long-form paper by creating a podcast or a YouTube video.

Coming from a multimodal approach requires an understanding of genres as well as who is the audience, the purpose for which the product is being made or shared, what is happening around it, and the rhetorical implications of the choices made. Simply stated, not everything is a five-paragraph essay. However, many students are told throughout their K-12 experience that academic or Standard American English (SAE) and the essay is the only way to write. In reality, the essay format is mostly nestled in academia and has little interaction in employment and digital spaces. We need to build bridges between the purpose of the essay, to teach how to organize an argument or claim and defend it, and the needs of a 21st society. The forums in which our students communicate are today’s public square. It is imperative to train and teach students how to share information, defend their claims and opinions, and think critically and persuasively by using the language and spaces they are and will continue to engage.

There is another aspect of multimodality that is seldom addressed– equity. The purpose of thinking equitable is creating ways to mitigate or totally remove barriers to access. As someone who is Black and grew up in poverty, I was blessed to have a mom who valued education and surrounded us with people who helped my sister and me access technology at an early age. As we grew up, my mom modeled how to use technology in professional contexts from composing emails to using Microsoft Office applications. For most people who share the experience of poverty, they do not have access to things as I did. As I work with first-year students in our survey course Pathway to Prosperity and teaching English, students are not “digital natives” as we think, especially if their schools and homes have limited access to current technology. Composing a traditional essay is difficult because they are still figuring out how to work a computer, typing on a standard keyboard, and navigating Word or Google Docs if they have access to those apps at all. However, most students are fluent in using their phones and are able to communicate fluently and creatively there.

"As we move towards a purely online experience, we must begin to embrace multimodality as a method of student composition"

Also, students are able to engage freely linguistically in terms of their audience. Students’ Right to their Own Language, a resolution released by the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1974, states “We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language -- the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another.” Using a multimodal approach allows for students to live this statement out and leverage what they bring to the table to communicate messages. It leaves space for students to learn how to use different dialects of English depending on the rhetorical situation and the genre needed to best execute the intended message. It also opens the opportunity for all people to engage and reach audiences that normally would not be considered because of understanding the value and validity of linguistic justice and diversity.

Lastly, embracing multimodality and using it in the classroom opens up opportunities for students to engage in genres applicable to their career aspirations. This requires instructors and institutions to think about and prioritize authentic learning and authentic tasks– applying practices to real-world experiences and contexts– in the creation of writing practices. For example, I ask students to write a cover letter for a real position in their field of study as a part of their resume creation. This way, they are able to connect their resumes to the more narrative and persuasive letter genre. Students can create commercials and video pitches or slide decks and give a speech to other students or professionals in their field. Also, students could do a marketing plan and then create the content for that plan. They can also use researched information to create a lab report with images or a webpage or blog with hyperlinks for people to see the texts that connect with the assignment.

In closing, we are no longer living in a two-dimensional, text-on-paper world. Everything is becoming more dynamic and we must begin to move out of the singular mindset created by old models espousing SAE and embrace the language and experiences our students currently bring to the table to advance their growth and prepare for an interactive world. As we continue to seek ways to engage with students and teach in a 21st century world, we must continue to think forward or we will become obsolete.