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Multimodality and Transmodality in the Classroom
Equity, Time Management, and the Graduate Teaching Assistant
Affordances and Constraints of Multimodality and Transmodality
Remixing and Revising
If college-level professors are looking to incorporate multimodal texts into their students’ homework or want them to analyze the effects of multimodality in a text, it is likely a worthy assignment. This can also take the form of multiple different assignments. Having students write a rhetorical analysis of a text is a good way to have students engage in multiple modes. In class, having the students do a group analysis of multiple artifacts in multiple different modes will foster their agency in choosing an artifact that they connect with and would like to discuss in an assignment. However, Laura Gonzales argues that as a part of students’ first-year composition courses, they should “remix” assignments. In particular, she looked at two universities that both assigned a rhetorical analysis and a personal narrative and told students to remix one of the two papers they had written through a different multimodal genre (Gonzales). This assignment forced students to be aware of their rhetorical choices in their previous assignment so that they could build upon and identify the necessary aspects they had to reproduce (Gonzales). If implemented into a first-year composition classroom, these assignments should include “documents uniting photographs, animated clips, videos, and audio files with written words to communicate a message in a variety of ways” (Ruefman 8).
This work is supported by Jody Shipka, who argues that “composition courses present students with the opportunity to begin structuring the occasions for, as well as the reception and delivery of, the work they produce” (Shipka 279). Bringing elements of multimodality into the first-year composition classroom allows for more relatable conversations and lets them engage with new and different ways of thinking (Shipka 279). These attributes that Shipka affords to multimodality can also be applied to transmodality, as by having the same text in different modalities will allow students more opportunities to think and create in digital spaces they may not have encountered before.