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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
Personal Examples and Reflections
Having a strong and uplifting community has a ripple effect, not just on Graduate Teaching Assistants, but also on the students we teach. While sometimes implicit, I have seen the positive effects of community first-hand. A strong community means a transfer of ideas, lessons, and materials between fellow Graduate Teaching Assistants and full-time faculty. Borrowing ideas and texts that others have had success with in their first-year composition classrooms is a good thing, especially when those texts engage the students.
In my experience, the best way to incorporate multimodality as a first-year composition instructor is to include it in your syllabus from the start. Even if day-to-day lesson plans are not completed, making space and planning to incorporate multimodal and transmodal lessons and readings will reduce the strain during the semester. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, I am fortunate that my university has a robust number of resources that help my peers and me with syllabus formation and tools to utilize during class. However, I recognize that this is not the case in many other higher education institutions.
I have been told time and again by my students that they do not like to read, or they simply do not read anything I assign; however, when things are “shaken up” by including things like a YouTube video or an episode of a podcast, they are much more inclined to come to class prepared. These ideas are also supported by The Atlantic’s 2024 article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The article cites students' lack of sustained focus on longer texts as something that has contributed to college-aged students being unable or unwilling to complete reading assignments (Horowitch).
I have also seen that showing students different versions of access when it comes to assigned texts helps them want to engage with them. If assigning an article from a newspaper or other online source, I aim to find or use one with an audio transcription. Taking two minutes to show students that these functions exist shows them that you are considering their preferences and may encourage them to utilize these tools when completing assigned readings. Some students then will choose not to do the reading the night before but will listen to the transcriptions while eating lunch or while walking to class, and they understand the material just the same as they do if they traditionally read the article—it is not about getting them to “read” the text in the way I want them to, but instead about allowing them to learn and understand the text in a way that is conducive to their learning.