“Working with multimodality is an entirely natural act that gives these producers a voice, and, while the world forges ahead using visuals, moving images, and haptic texts, teaching and learning in school remains anchored to words, often on printed pages. There is a need to shift this conversation, and producers whose livelihoods rely on working with modes competently and successfully to covey meanings, hold promise for providing concrete, specific ways of doing so” (3). “Producers design things, and design physically manifests ideas, beliefs, and values through modes. In this way, design calls on people to arrange modes in very specific ways to achieve specific effects…[T]he social practices of production play a role in what material resources are chosen to produce a text” (6-7).
“Though most texts are multimodal and often have dominant modes, all modes are partial in expressing meanings…because modes contribute to meaning in different ways. Yet certain moves are more powerful than others. The more or less powerful nature of modes have significant implications for conceptions and process of learning…[L]everaging the power of less visible modes is a way of preparing students for life. It is clear that modes work together to produce a greater meaning than either mode could on its own” (146-7). In this vein, she identifies five strategies for incorporating multimodality into the classroom:
- “a connection between childhood interests, passions and competence with modes…[T]eachers need to identify precisely what Kress talked about – what modes students work with comfortably and tacitly and shape literacy programs around those modes” (149)
- “collaboration and communities of practices within which you make meaning…[It] is both the nature of collaborative work and different perspectives that are the key properties for creative work” (149).
- “Each practice must be labelled, taught, and critically framed for students. For example, if students work on an animation project, then teachers need to model practices enacted during the process and then have students enact practices themselves” (150).
- “Most producers talked about the concept of remix-as in turning an existing text or resource into something new and different…Remix needs more traction in writing curriculum” (150).
- “Language, image, sound, moving image can combine to convey stories in vastly different ways and there needs to be an openness and fluidity to teaching that allows the use and application of different modes when students either respond to texts or when they are producing texts for a project” (151).
One of the interesting things she discusses is designing texts such that they include key words that will appear on search engines (as opposed to flashy, pretty words) and that creates connections to multiple texts.
Key Terms
- Mode: “a mode is a unit of expression and representation. As long as a person and community treats something as able to express and represent meanings, then it’s the criteria of a representational and communication mode…[Mode] represents ‘the outcome of the cultural shaping of material’” (3). To be a mode that expresses, that represents, that signals a person or a context, it need to have three functions: interpersonal functions that speak to an audience; more immaterial qualities that express ideas, values, beliefs, emotions, sense as ideational functions; and, physical features that materialize these more ephemeral qualities of texts as textual functions” (4)
- Transmodal elements: “elements that reach across modes; for example, there is an interdependence between visual modes and sound modes in films. The phrase, the sum of all parts is greater than the whole, comes to mind when describing transmodal moments” (4-5)
- Intermodal effects: “represent links between modes that can exist separately but that cross-reference each other” (5)
- Intramodal elements: involve modes that cohere to make meaning” (5).