multimodal

If you think all this just can’t change a whole history of language and literature, think again.

—Constance Hale, Wired Style

The only question is, when will it arrive?

I refer to the avalanche thundering toward us, an avalanche that has already struck media writing.

The interesting writer, the informative speaker, the accurate thinker, and the sane individual operate on all levels of the abstraction ladder, moving quickly and gracefully and in orderly fashion from higher to lower, from lower to higher, with minds as lithe and deft and beautiful as monkeys in a tree.

—S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (1991)

The call for papers for this release of The Writing Instructor asked teachers, scholars, and students working in middle and secondary education to explore theories and methods of teaching media literacy and popular culture to adolescents. The essays, editorials, hypertexts, and on-line conversations we have included address issues of current interest and debate in the field of media literacy education, particularly in connection to composition studies and writing pedagogy. So what is media literacy?

Launch

Launch

The impetus for this special issue came from multiple avenues over the past several years as we have journeyed professionally and concurrently as students of multimodal composition; authors of multimodal scholarship; faculty members implementing multimodal projects into our courses; and mentors guiding colleagues, adjunct faculty, and high school dual enrollment instructors in their own construction and production of multimodal assignments.

Introduction

As the editors note in their introduction to this issue of The Writing Instructor, some teachers of writing receive training in teaching writing with computers, and those that have completed their pre-service training or graduate coursework recently may have been introduced to multimodal pedagogies. The majority of college writing teachers, however, lack the training necessary to help students compose multimodal texts. In short, they teach writing how they learned to write, and this process is a traditional print-based one.

Someone saying negative things about the Harry Potter series practically elicits the same reaction as cursing motherhood, apple pie, and baseball--how dare anyone question something, anything, that motivates children to read? Reading is a wholesome activity. Reading is good. Reading is fundamental. Reading is the foundation for a literate, democratic society. Reading is the cornerstone of learning.

. . . the printed book, like any other technology, will not live forever.

—Raymond Kurzweil

On 9 August 2001, I engaged in an email conversation with Dr. Donna E. Alvermann, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, about media literacy education. We traded electronic observations about media literacy over the course of approximately two hours, each sitting in our university office in front of our respective computer screens, Donna’s in Athens, Georgia, and mine in West Lafayette, Indiana.