By Thomas Barker | STC Fellow and Christina Grant | Guest Columnist
This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to column editor Thomas Barker at ttbarker@ualberta.ca.
Often instructors in classes that have a diversity of students face the challenge of motivating them. How can a communication instructor find a common ground that changes the game for all students? When culture is a huge factor in motivating students, just assigning a paper might just get blank stares. But when an instructor can tap into the students’ shared experiences, particularly in the area of media, those blank stares can morph into expressions of surprise, and then determination.
In this column, I would like to explore how my colleague Christina Grant at the University of Alberta approached the challenge of motivating students in a diverse class setting. In Christina’s Writing Studies 101 Exploring Writing course, the students had just exited the university’s “Bridging Program.” Bridging Program students have overall lower English writing skills, and their communication skills in English are 20 to 30 percent lower than native English-speaking students. These students come from health studies, cultural studies, business and economics, and all from multilingual backgrounds. As such it’s hard to fire them up about communicating in English. Christina, after puzzling with these challenges, came up with an assignment that seemed to both evoke and help their voices shine.
Christina’s approach changed the game for these students and, at the same time took an unconventional approach that could benefit other communication instructors. The multimodal approach to writing gave the students the chance to tap into their shared excitement over media-based communication and merge it with their learning. That excitement fuelled their work in creating media communications.
First, we will look at what we mean by multimodal as a media for student and professional writing. Then we will explore how Grant structured her assignment and presented it to her students. We will look at some of the benefits that she and her students realized once they had created and presented their work. Finally, we will touch on some tips and practices that other instructors can use to change the game in their diverse classroom settings.
What Is Multimodal?
On a simple level, multimodal is a method of communicating that uses using multiple modes or media channels. From a sensory perspective, multimodal can refer to using sight, sound, and motion all in the same communication. As Grant describes it, multimodal can be any kind of sound, any kind of image, or any kind of text. The key word here is any, which may be what most appealed to the students. These students, while they may have a diversity of language skills, already possess what Professors Gunter Kress and Carey Jewitt at the University of London call “multimodal literacy.”
In a nutshell, multimodal literacy “focuses on the design of discourse by investigating the contributions of specific semiotic resources, (e.g. language, gesture, images) co-deployed across various modalities (e.g. visual, aural, somatic), as well as their interaction and integration in constructing a coherent multimodal text (such as advertisements, posters, news report, websites, films).” This understanding of communication is a game changer for Grant’s students because, for them, it allowed them to overcome whatever inhibitions they have about textual communication. It legitimized their fascination with modes of communication (sound and images) and turned their diversity, in all senses, into a multimodal asset. But how can these ideas shape communication assignments?
The Assignment
For Grant, the assignment had to accomplish a simple goal: to replace a 1200-word, standard written paper that draws from at least 3 academic sources. Here is what the students saw: “Your assignment is to take something important that you learned from the course and share it with students who are struggling to write.” So they understand the learning zone: it focuses on where the students themselves were when the course started. Here’s the game changer: The project must be four to seven minutes long and use whatever mode or combination of modes the student want.
For some students the solution was fairly standard: a brochure on writing. But for most the assignment opened them up to the world of video, sound and sound sampling, animation, cartoons, and Prezi, imovies, slides, and videos.
To prepare the students, Grant took them to the Technologies in Education Lab at the University of Alberta. The ET lab location, a version of which which can be found on most campuses, exists to help instructors and student use a variety of modes—visual, text, sound—to shape and convey ideas. “They really helped me out,” says Grant. “I couldn’t have done it without them.” At the lab, where Grant held some classes, students were exposed to high tech tools such as cameras, microphones, recording instruments, big screens, and a willing staff to help them get started and complete their work.
Grant’s other collaborator was Don Mason, Director of the English Language Program, in the Faculty of Extension, who volunteered to share the “winning” presentations with the over 300 students in his Program. In this way, says Grant, the communication instructor can bridge the silos that are so pervasive in the University and collaborate with instructors who also face challenges of diversity. Mason’s program and students provided the potential audience for the students’ videos. This potential audience gave the students a professional and useful target. As Grant puts it, the standards of acceptability based on a real audience, lent authenticity to the pride that students felt in their work.
The Result
Students worked individually or in pairs to create their multimodal projects. Most of the projects were movies—interviews, students talking about writing, or skits about writing. Others used a program called GoAnimate to create their projects and dramatize the challenges they faced. It wasn’t all just free-form. Grant made it clear to the students that the scripted narration needed to be in standard written English. This, she explains, was one of the strengths of the assignment. These students leapt at the chance to show off their language skills in a format and medium that excited them. Instead of feeling exposed, vulnerable, at risk, and embarrassed, these students took pride their presentations. They were excited and shared their work eagerly. They all wanted to share their work.
Other advantages that Grant saw in the projects had to do with the novelty of the students’ work, and the degree of play and creativity that they showed. But more than that, the students were given a choice of media and allowed to chose one that facilitated their voice. Even more, the project was authentic in that it had the potential to be shared with other learners. In doing so it pushed the boundaries—changed the game—for the students. And the principles that Grant uncovered in the project can also change the game for instructors.
Using Multimodal Assignments
These assignments were not without challenges. For the instructor, there is always an unknown when structuring and marking the work. How could they be evaluated fairly when many different products convey the same ideas. How can the instructor let go of control over the assignment and really give students free rein? To help sort out the marking, Grant used a rubric that focused on communication, thinking, knowledge and understanding and language. And further, she collaborated with an outside evaluator to provide feedback, which helped shape the holistic approach.
From the student perspective, they students faced the substantial challenge of learning the new technology in addition to finding their subject, limiting their scope, and shaping their message. But beyond this, they had to think modally: how does a message mean something different when you speak it, draw it, or dramatize it. Shaping messages to specific audiences—in this case naive learners in English—meant that the students had to invest in their result. “They cared about their projects,” says Grant. That’s a game changer for her and something she had not seen in her years of teaching before.
And for some, multimodal assignments—assignments that fall somewhat short of standards for word count for standard English—don’t look like traditional assignments. And for program administrators charged with making sure incoming students meet levels of proficiency, the instructor can face a challenge of overcoming implicit biases in favor of traditional writing forms. So instructors need to be ready to justify the approach when faced with the inevitable comments like, “The students aren’t writing enough!” The compromise, says Grant, is in the enthusiasm that students generate. The word count will come, she suggests, once students get to a plateau of literacy in communication. And, in fact, the students wrote more words—in proposals, review comments, and other forms—than they might do in a traditional “essay-based” course.
Tips for Instructors
For instructors thinking about taking the risks inherent in multimodal assignments, Grant has a few well-earned bits of advice.
- Adequate preparation. Be clear about the goals of the assignment, including academic rigor, and purposeful and correct messages. The goal of reaching a real audience helps shape the students’ efforts.
- Teach and schedule the process. Multimodal projects need to follow steps: content first, testing of ideas, learning the technology, producing the product, editing and revising, and presenting. “It’s a messy process,” says Grant, “but it works.” She built in two proposals and storyboards to help them proof their ideas first. The process also used feedback of their peers to help maintain the focus of the course on communication.
- Control the technology. Students will produce a weak product, says Grant, if they immerse themselves in the technology before they have a viable message and plan. That said, it’s important to have technological support for their work, as in tutors and lab assistants.
In classes that pose challenges in language skills, cultural adaptation, and time constraints, the multimodal approach can help. In these classes, as we have seen, students need to build their sense that they have something to say and a way to say it. Teachers get to work with delighted students and evaluated delightful results. Says Grant, “By the end of the class the students are laughing and clapping for each other. Suddenly their voices are public.” That’s a game changer.
References
What is Multimodal Literacy? https://multimodalstudies.wordpress.com/what-is-multimodal-literacy/
New York Film Academy: Student Resources. This website contains a list of free software students can use for video and animation. https://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/best-free-open-source-animation-software/
