Multimodal Composition

     I did not hear the term "multimodal" until I was in my second semester of my freshman year of college, and it still took me another semester before I understood what it meant. Multimodal composition at its most basic definition is using multiple forms of expression as a tool for teaching or learning. Looking back, we used multimodal composition in school very frequently.

    In the classroom when I was growing up, anytime we read a play, we assigned parts and acted it out in class. Even reading for a character allowed my classmates to express their creativity, assigning accents and distinct voices to characters. In the book "Teaching Literature to Adolescents" author Richard Beach claims that "One benefit of engaging in drama activities is that students shift from being passive responders to a text to become active producers of language. They are now spontaneously employing language and embodied actions to assume a role, address a problem or dilemma, respond to others' talk, and invent an imagined space for their interactions." During my senior year of high school, we read the play "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen. One of the boys in my class decided to play Nora, the main character, every day, and he would talk in a high pitched voice. Things like that made reading the play so much fun, and "A Doll's House" is, to date, my favorite play I've ever read.

    In their article "'To Be, or Not to Be': Modernizing Shakespeare with Multimodal Learning Stations", authors Harvey, Deuel, and Marlatt discuss multimodal stations that were used to help students as they were introduced to Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The stations were purely meant to be introductory, since Shakespeare is notoriously hard to understand. There were 5 stations: English theater in the Elizabethan Era, Elizabethan England, Shakespeare's Life, Shakespeare's Works, and "Why Shakespeare Matters". The stations had QR codes for websites and videos and instructions for each station, creating an interactive lesson using technology, which has become an important resource in the classroom. They said that the students were more engaged and instead of waiting for certain stations to end, the students often had to be reminded that their time was up. The stations also helped prompt great discussion. The authors mention one student who was usually disengaged from the lesson "looked up from his smartphone and asked, 'If Shakespeare was around today, what form of media do you think he would use to create his stuff?'" That honestly is such a good question, and I'm glad that it prompted a discussion with his classmates connecting the author they were learning about and about to read from to modern types of media. Once again, they did the stations before they even started reading Shakespeare so that they would remember and it would help them make connections when reading later. 

    For example, also during my senior year of high school, we read King Lear, and an assignment was to generate our own memes. This was my meme:

    At the time, I thought I was the funniest person on the planet. Looking back, I still find it funny. That's the beauty of doing things multimodally. As soon as I started writing about the Shakespeare lesson, and my brain immediately went to this meme. I made this meme for bonus points ONCE, yet I still clearly remember it. I've only read the play once, and I didn't even like it, but seeing this meme that I made helps me remember what happen and how I felt at the time. I remember being annoyed thinking Cordelia was some important character but she leaves during Act I and doesn't return until Act IV or V when so much bad stuff has already happened that she just missed. This was my opportunity to express my annoyance about the character creatively.