Download PDFContents
Multimodality and Transmodality in the Classroom
Equity, Time Management, and the Graduate Teaching Assistant
Affordances and Constraints of Multimodality and Transmodality
Multimodality and Transmodality in the Classroom
The way students learn and comprehend is rapidly changing, mainly due to technology. These ideas are not necessarily new, but universities have been fairly slow in changing their ways to account for these societal shifts. Carey Jewitt and Gunther Kress believe the best way to foster learning in an English classroom is by utilizing multimodality. They argue that by utilizing multimodality in the classroom, students and teachers are able to foster notions of ability, resistance, and identity (Jewitt and Kress 344). Not only does this help create an anti-racist classroom, but it also pushes students to find their own voice within the classroom. While Jewitt and Kress do not focus directly on first-year composition, many of their arguments are transferable to first-year composition classrooms, as they often include international students or students whose first language is not English. Many first-year composition classrooms focus on identity, but it has been proven that non-native English speakers and international students find it harder to express these identities because they fear being “othered.” Jewitt and Kress argue that “a full understanding of English demands attention to the use of all modes in use and the relationship between them” (344). In other words, using multimodal texts in an English classroom is not enough; teachers need to push and use all of these modes to bridge connections between these ideas and different modes (Jewitt and Kress 344).
Jewitt and Kress also point to English textbooks. In particular, they discuss how print textbooks have even adapted a multimodal design (Jewitt and Kress 344-345). In their research, they discuss how in English textbooks, the average number of images increased at an exponential rate throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first century (Jewitt and Kress 344). However, since 2005, images have not just recreated what is already written in the book; instead, concepts are introduced and analyzed visually (Jewitt and Kress 345).