Unit Overview

 
 

For two decades researchers have predicted the future of composition as increasingly digital.

In 1996 the New London Group revealed a new approach to literacy called “multiliteracies”, which “overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic and private lives of students” (60). Nineteen years later the president of the Conference on College Composition and Communication declared that “the essay is dead”; the expository essay has become a limited mode of communication, and to our students, a relic, or, if it was ever known to begin with, a mystery. Around the same time the essay’s eulogy was read at the CCCC opening statements, Dr. J. Gray was conducting research with first year college students to determine the “lingering effects of the five-paragraph essay” (2014). Dr. Gray’s findings and conclusions are included here at length:


The results of this study are dismal because the participants move away from possibility, growth, creativity, and engagement. The participants share their thoughts on the five-paragraph essay and other highly standardized writing assignments that illustrate disengagement with their coursework. The students represent their work as passive, recitation-based, mechanical, and impersonal (166).

This unit is designed to incorporate multimodal and multimedia elements into the writing process of students in an ELA classroom. During the final three weeks of an American Literature & Writing class, students will write a research-based essay and design multimodal versions of that essay. New forms–or rather, not-all-that-new, but new to the ELA classroom–of composition increase student motivation, prepare students to address trends, issues and topics outside of the classroom and develop the digital literacy skills that students employ in their lives daily, but are not yet skills honed in the classroom.

Assessment

Multimodal literacies will need new forms of assessment and strategies for determining proper evaluations, on the part of the teacher, and proper communication of the evaluative expectations to the students.

NCTE statement on multimodal literacies, “The complexity of multimodal work suggests that an assessment process must be developed and refined collaboratively by students, teachers, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders over time.”

Student Motivation

The importance of this unit, which is to say the importance of multimodal writing in ELA classrooms, is that this type of ‘writing’ boosts students’ motivation and confidence. I’d argue that all pedagogy has this goal: highly motivated students who feel confident in their creations. Multimodal literacies are the same, and actually, multimodal writing may be a salve to the painful reality of unmotivated students, lifeless writing, and rote production of a five-paragraph essay.

Brett Darrington and Tonia Dousay at the University of Wyoming quoted E. Daniels from the English Journal that there are three factors in a motivating learning environment: 

1. When students feel like they have some control over their learning environment (autonomy).

2. When students feel like they have value within the context of class and school (relatedness).

3. When students feel like they have the skills needed to complete the task (competence). 

Darrington and Dousay go on to point out that Multimodal writing has “four areas of relative advantage over traditional writing assignments” (30).

  1. The role of the audience in the work (audiences for multimodal writing are made more real by the channels of communication in the digital world)

  2. The amount of choice and control students have about their work (the choices within this unit of study are provided for this reason; control and choice are directly related to a motivating learning environment as stated above)

  3. The relevance of assignments to students’ lives and interests (which may contribute to both relatedness and competence). 

  4. The novelty of media (any teacher would agree, I think, that novelty = student interest)

Unit/ Class information

Designed for an English 3: American Literature and Writing course at an independent secondary boarding/day school. Class size: 8-10
Level: Third-year
Time: 3 weeks (minimum)

Unit Design Project for Dr. Alecia Magnifico’s course ENGL 810S Writing Pedagogy at the University of New Hampshire.

READ THE FULL OVERVIEW

Works Cited in Overview

Banks, A. “Ain’t No Walls behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, Freedom” College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 267-279, December 2015.

Darrington, B., & Dousay, T. Using multimodal writing to motivate struggling students to write. TechTrends, 59(6), 29-34, 2015, doi:10.1007/s11528-015-0901-7.

Gray, J. “You Can’t Be Creative Anymore”: Students Reflect on the Lingering Effects of the Five-Paragraph Essay. Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education, 3(2), Article 10, Fall 2014, 152-168, 2014, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/wte/vol3/iss2/10/.

“Multimodal Literacies”. NCTE. 17 November 2005. https://ncte.org/statement/multimodalliteracies/.