I was lucky to grow up attending schools filled with racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, and socio-economic diversity. While this added to my experience, it wasn’t until reflecting on my education towards the end of college that I began to see the ways in which the classrooms I had been a part of often included diversity without truly or fully incorporating every voice and every skillset. I wanted to find a way to make these same classrooms—rich in human experience and history and understanding—into spaces where students taught each other and where their voices and knowledge were given more priority. As a teacher, I consider it my mission to engage students in critical thought and interrogation about themselves and others, to get them listening and speaking across divides, and to do so by incorporating a diversity of voices and media and encouraging my students to take control and agency in their own education and understandings. My focus on inquiry, diversity, and social justice are brought to class (and beyond) each day.
Inquiry & Interconnection
A multimodal classroom that fosters curiosity and individuality is not about placing modes in opposition, but rather in conversation with each other; making all avenues open for consideration and critique. Gunther Kress phrases this idea as a question, asking, “Can image do things that writing cannot do? Or what is it that writing can do that image cannot?” (12). Technology in my classroom is not about prioritizing one type of text over another. Rather, it is about providing a diverse group of learners with an equally diverse group of texts. In writing, we ask how “style” helps to convey and strengthen our message.
In my class, I extend that question to types of text. We pair, for example, World War II propaganda images with our reading of MAUS to help unpack historical context and deepen our understanding of visual storytelling and rhetorical techniques. Or we look at photojournalism from the Vietnam War, and each student performs a “close reading” of an image of their choosing, comparing it to themes and stories in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Students discuss similarities and differences between the themes, and the more or less effective ways themes were communicated in each medium. Students were expected to analyze with an artistic and academic eye, and incorporate language and vocabulary specific to each medium as well as generally applied to composition, essentially applying their “close reading” skills to both written and image-based texts. Integrating technology is about helping our students recognize strengths and weaknesses of different genres and providing them the variety they are becoming more and more used to in their daily life.
Diversity & Dialogue
Such diversity of texts and modes should reflect the diversity in our student body, and the world. Our students bring a wide range of skills, strengths, and potential that in a traditional English classroom may go completely un(der)-utilized. I challenge myself, as Jason Palmeri pushes us all as teachers, to help students to build on the knowledge of composing they already have, while also exploring and choosing new modalities that may better or best help them convey their ideas. It is our job as teachers who value effective self-expression to help students better understand themselves and their audience while also giving them the tools they need to communicate across divides. I strive to help my students approach problems and solve them in their own unique way, and to provide them with new frameworks and options.
Recently in my tenth grade American Studies class, our teaching team provided an opportunity for creativity and thoughtful analysis and reflection by asking students to create an exhibit that tells the story of a certain time period (“the early nineties,” “the mid-seventies”). Students had to define their narrative; curate and analyze a collection of artifacts in multiple modes; consider architecture and layout of their museum; and finally, write a proposal for their exhibit. As students worked, they were asked to make thoughtful, intentional choices and reflect hard on how each piece helped to tell their story, and which pieces were most effective. By the end, students had an expanded view of what it meant to tell a story (and how, and to whom) and had tools to analyze different cultural texts, genres, and ways to work in multiple media.
Social Justice & Self Worth
As a teacher of social justice and concepts of identity, I must continually “critically analyze and attempt to transform material hierarchies of class, gender, race, disability, and sexuality” within my classroom, which means not only subverting the traditional privileging of the printed word in our classes (Friere and Smitherman), but also encouraging students to choose and value the modes that best suit their (and others’) needs, histories, and identities (Palmeri 66). I believe strongly in the student-centered classroom, which, especially in cooperation with technology, questions the traditional roles of teacher, student, and even text. “The potentials of these technologies,” Kress writes, “imply a radical social change, a redistribution of semiotic power, the power to make and disseminate meanings” (17). My students come into my classroom well aware of their potential to reach others and be heard, even if they have not yet critically analyzed their own audience, message, tone, and media choices—a process we embark on together.
Empowering students to produce texts that are meaningful to them and effectively and creatively reach a wide audience can be a “powerful way for students to advocate for the kinds of social change that they would like to see in the world” (Palmeri 174). My students achieved this through a create-your-own assignment, relating themes from our in-class written texts to their own lives and/or the wider world. Students produced documentaries, podcasts, maps, photo collages, songs, speeches; even kids who went the more “traditional” route veered a bit with screenplays, operas, magazines, poetry, and memoirs. Many students involved peers and teachers beyond our class, thus projecting their voices and our in-class work out into their wider world. By empowering students to come up with their own assignments, they were able to share their own voice and ideas, all while still composing a well-produced and effective text that took into account all the skills they would need in writing a traditional essay (audience, argument, organization, style, etc).
WORKS CITED:
Kress, Gunther. Literacy In The New Media Age. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Digital.
Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Digital.
Inquiry & Interconnection
A multimodal classroom that fosters curiosity and individuality is not about placing modes in opposition, but rather in conversation with each other; making all avenues open for consideration and critique. Gunther Kress phrases this idea as a question, asking, “Can image do things that writing cannot do? Or what is it that writing can do that image cannot?” (12). Technology in my classroom is not about prioritizing one type of text over another. Rather, it is about providing a diverse group of learners with an equally diverse group of texts. In writing, we ask how “style” helps to convey and strengthen our message.
In my class, I extend that question to types of text. We pair, for example, World War II propaganda images with our reading of MAUS to help unpack historical context and deepen our understanding of visual storytelling and rhetorical techniques. Or we look at photojournalism from the Vietnam War, and each student performs a “close reading” of an image of their choosing, comparing it to themes and stories in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Students discuss similarities and differences between the themes, and the more or less effective ways themes were communicated in each medium. Students were expected to analyze with an artistic and academic eye, and incorporate language and vocabulary specific to each medium as well as generally applied to composition, essentially applying their “close reading” skills to both written and image-based texts. Integrating technology is about helping our students recognize strengths and weaknesses of different genres and providing them the variety they are becoming more and more used to in their daily life.
Diversity & Dialogue
Such diversity of texts and modes should reflect the diversity in our student body, and the world. Our students bring a wide range of skills, strengths, and potential that in a traditional English classroom may go completely un(der)-utilized. I challenge myself, as Jason Palmeri pushes us all as teachers, to help students to build on the knowledge of composing they already have, while also exploring and choosing new modalities that may better or best help them convey their ideas. It is our job as teachers who value effective self-expression to help students better understand themselves and their audience while also giving them the tools they need to communicate across divides. I strive to help my students approach problems and solve them in their own unique way, and to provide them with new frameworks and options.
Recently in my tenth grade American Studies class, our teaching team provided an opportunity for creativity and thoughtful analysis and reflection by asking students to create an exhibit that tells the story of a certain time period (“the early nineties,” “the mid-seventies”). Students had to define their narrative; curate and analyze a collection of artifacts in multiple modes; consider architecture and layout of their museum; and finally, write a proposal for their exhibit. As students worked, they were asked to make thoughtful, intentional choices and reflect hard on how each piece helped to tell their story, and which pieces were most effective. By the end, students had an expanded view of what it meant to tell a story (and how, and to whom) and had tools to analyze different cultural texts, genres, and ways to work in multiple media.
Social Justice & Self Worth
As a teacher of social justice and concepts of identity, I must continually “critically analyze and attempt to transform material hierarchies of class, gender, race, disability, and sexuality” within my classroom, which means not only subverting the traditional privileging of the printed word in our classes (Friere and Smitherman), but also encouraging students to choose and value the modes that best suit their (and others’) needs, histories, and identities (Palmeri 66). I believe strongly in the student-centered classroom, which, especially in cooperation with technology, questions the traditional roles of teacher, student, and even text. “The potentials of these technologies,” Kress writes, “imply a radical social change, a redistribution of semiotic power, the power to make and disseminate meanings” (17). My students come into my classroom well aware of their potential to reach others and be heard, even if they have not yet critically analyzed their own audience, message, tone, and media choices—a process we embark on together.
Empowering students to produce texts that are meaningful to them and effectively and creatively reach a wide audience can be a “powerful way for students to advocate for the kinds of social change that they would like to see in the world” (Palmeri 174). My students achieved this through a create-your-own assignment, relating themes from our in-class written texts to their own lives and/or the wider world. Students produced documentaries, podcasts, maps, photo collages, songs, speeches; even kids who went the more “traditional” route veered a bit with screenplays, operas, magazines, poetry, and memoirs. Many students involved peers and teachers beyond our class, thus projecting their voices and our in-class work out into their wider world. By empowering students to come up with their own assignments, they were able to share their own voice and ideas, all while still composing a well-produced and effective text that took into account all the skills they would need in writing a traditional essay (audience, argument, organization, style, etc).
WORKS CITED:
Kress, Gunther. Literacy In The New Media Age. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Digital.
Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Digital.