A Restart of What Language Arts Is: Bringing Multimodal Assignments Into Secondary Language Arts

Abstract

Multimodal assignments in language arts involve student learning through not only print and verbal language activities but also visual, kinesthetic, aural, and spatial activities. Language arts teachers can use these elements as a means of developing stronger critical thinking among their students. Traditionally, in language arts classrooms, print media has been at the top of the media hierarchy. Multimodality instead posits print texts as part of a wider range of communication options. Students who participate in multimodal activities fall into one of three groups: students who struggle to connect the multimodal course activities with what they see as real language arts and literacy work; students who connect quite actively and dramatically with multimodal course activities and see them as highly relevant to language arts; and students who are not certain how nonprint and print texts are connected but who start to accept such connections as important over time. These contradictions within student experiences highlight a need for educators to carefully consider both the conditions under which multimodal assignments are given and the underlying reasons for bringing multimodal thinking into the classroom. Multimodality can free students' thinking, but only if students understand that multimodal activities are part of an overall orientation towards thinking and communication. If students see them as a temporary change of pace before returning to print-based thinking, then such activities can easily be devalued or seen as a way to avoid traditional reading and writing as well as thinking. Larger curricular goals also need to be made clear for students so that they have an opportunity to move beyond a mindset of assignment completion and think about how multimodal thinking fits into broader communication purposes.