After reading about Sparke and McKowen’s Montage and Kytle’s Comp Box, I would love to be able to see and use these materials. Next year, I will be introducing IB English Language and Literature to my school. This course includes analysis of language in media as well as in cultural contexts, so we will be looking at multimodal non-literary texts such as advertisements and newspaper articles. Thus, I found the discussion of multimodal texts from our reading very relevant, and am thinking about how I can practically adapt ideas for my classroom. For example, the media collage, initially proposed by Kytle and then updated by Palmeri, seems like an interesting and active way to get students to look at media bias comprehensively. Thinking back to when I took the IB course as a high school student, we spent a lot of time annotating and writing essays about multimodal texts. This was fine for me as I am very much an alphabetic learner, but as a teacher, I would like to incorporate a wider variety of classroom activities for students with different interests and abilities.
Similarly, I do not entirely disagree with the use of multimodal projects as a way to get students into more conventional alphabetical composing. I think that using multimedia production to engage students who may be ‘bored’ by alphabetic writing is a great idea. In fact, Burnett and Thomason’s position that their cassette slideshow assignment helps students develop skills in both conventional research writing and multimedia technologies sounds like a win-win situation.
However, I am wary of prioritizing alphabetic composition as the ultimate goal. Echoing Palmeri, I would argue that students should practice various composition modes and be taught how to select the most appropriate one for their specific situation. At the same time, this can be at odds with external standards that teachers are often expected to work towards. For example, in my IB course I will be preparing my students for the final exams, which will ask them to produce timed analytical writing.
Along similar lines, I recognise what Wiener says about students’ fears of chasing correctness and how that may hold them back in conventional alphabetic writing. Even though most English teachers I know do not penalise every grammatical error while marking, as Wiener seems to suggest, I must admit that I – and other teachers I’ve worked with – tend to grade analytical essays more strictly than creative projects. Indeed, we have more experience with and thus perhaps more standard ideas of what a ‘good’ essay looks like, whereas there is “not much in visual presentation that we would know how to grade or correct” (Wiener qtd. in Palmeri ch. 3). In both creative writing and multimodal projects, my colleagues and I are likely to award full credit if students put in effort and follow guidelines, but we do not afford the same understanding to analytical essays. This then brings up the more complicated question of how one assigns grades in a subject like English.