Multimodal Considerations in English Composition

Relevant to setting a tone for the consideration of multimodality in the teaching of composition, Yancey and Palmeri provide interesting insights about how the field has developed such ideas. Almost ten years ago, Kathleen Yancey delivered a chairs address to the audience at the notorious College Composition and Communication Conference, in which she highlights the importance of considering multiple literacies and modes of delivery. On the other hand, Jason Palmeri starts off is book Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy by doing just that, providing a background delineation of past work that could be contemporarily considered as advocating for multimodal considerations in the teaching of compositions.

Yancey’s piece is in itself multimodal, incorporating quotes by relevant authors of composition and communication studies, among others, as well as images that showcase collages, interposed frames of interfaces, pictures, or photographs. In the limited space of the text, she claims that we “already inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across context of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school” (Yancey 308). In this statement, I would argue, lies the gist of her visualization of where the field is at, and where its scholars should focus their attention. Intertextual circulation, medium, delivery, different communication pieces in different media and for different audiences, transferring process considering sites and striving to become members of a writing public are some of the ideas she elaborates briefly, but successfully.

The concept of process is one that Jason Palmeri also expounds upon in the first chapter of his book. He references the work that was done in the 70’s and 80’s because “it makes sense to return to these key theories to see how they might inform” our redefinition of “the landscape of composition to incorporate digital multimodal production” (Palmeri 25). While I agree that “if we can teach students to understand how they make meaning with visual imagery in their minds, we may be able also to help them develop a more critical consciousness of how they make meaning on the page,” I would add that our purpose should be the opposite, to help them appreciate the imagery of their world through their writing. Many of his pedagogical suggestions resonated as I considered how I carried out my research on exploring multimodal critical media literacy in an ESL college classroom by having students consider film, music and narrative theories and how they play out in their daily lives.