I found Palmeri’s discussion of writing (composing) as an act of translation very illuminating, and came away from this reading with some ideas for how to make the process of planning and revision more interesting and possibly more useful. I have been trying to emphasize writing as a process in my classes, but my strategies are not always successful. For example, to encourage planning and outlining before essay writing, we sometimes make outlines a required component and award a nominal completion grade for them. While some students see the value of planning, others just scribble a few words to get the completion grade, or even go back and write the outline after finishing their essay. I think that practicing alternate modes of brainstorming and planning, whether that is drawing or speaking aloud (as an alternative to freewriting), could allow students to be more creative and truly think about their assignment in whatever mode they feel most comfortable with. Similarly, I have a lot of trouble getting students to understand that revision is more than fixing grammar mistakes and rewording unclear sentences. Palmeri’s suggestion of translating text into pictures would force students to more deeply reconsider and engage with the ideas they are trying to convey.
In addition to pictures and speech, I am also thinking about the possibility of having students physicalize their assignments. In our classes, students sometimes act out or physicalize scenes from the texts we study (especially plays), but I have never considered having them physicalize their own writing. It would be more difficult, as their writing is often analytical rather than narrative, but I think it would be an interesting experiment. There will surely be pushback from some students who are used to being expected to produce writing in English class, whether or not they enjoy it, but as Palmeri noted, exposing students to a variety of modes and teaching them how to choose to most appropriate one is a valuable skill that needs to be developed.
Finally, Palmeri’s discussion of how multimodal ways of knowing help students develop a deeper understanding of the world reminded me of a class I have taken in which we looked at cognitive approaches to education. Students tend to better remember information that is presented in multiple modes, because that increases possible retrieval routes and does not overwhelm attention and working memory capacity. That, combined with the fact that generating information results in deeper encoding and stronger memory trace (compared to merely receiving information), would logically explain how having students work in multiple modes leads to better understanding and retention. At the time, the scientific studies we read often related to subjects like science and maths, in which remembering and recalling material is critical. Thus, it was interesting to reading about how these similar concepts can be applied to more skills-based fields such as composition.