multimodal teaching and learning: creating spaces for content teachers

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144 Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(2) October 2008 doi:10.1598/JAAL.52.2.5 © 2008 International Reading Association (pp. 144–153) Mary Thompson Multimodal learning encourages teachers to think about how to involve adolescents in looking at multiple forms of text to examine what it means to their identities and beliefs about the world. Multimodal Teaching and Learning: Creating Spaces for Content Teachers W hat does literacy have to do with content subjects? The graduate students saunter in on the first day of class, some clustering in small groups of known friends and others sitting alone quietly for a class dubiously titled “Middle Childhood/Adolescent Literacy Methods.” As a lit- eracy professor teaching students majoring in content area subjects, I am fully aware that most of the students staring at me the first day believe that literacy has nothing to do with their content area major and that the class is an un- necessary requirement in their academic program. My main goal is to deconstruct the myth that literacy is unrelated to so- cial studies, math, and science disciplines and to help my students see the role of literacy as part of their content areas. To do this, my students and I start by redefining what literacy is by taking a sociocultural view that literacy is more than reading and writing (Gee, 1996) of print-based texts to consider the multiple ways we “read” the world around us (Freire, 2000) through various modes of meaning (Kress, 2003). It is through this discussion that the term multimodal literacy (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) is introduced and reflected upon. By examining literacy as plural (i.e., literacies), we are able to reconceptualize and reexamine the ways in which literacies are used all around us. For example, graphs are read in math class; various primary documents (including photo- graphs) are examined in social studies curriculum; and results are observed, documented, and hypothesized on using various modes (including visual, kinesthetic, and auditory) in a science laboratory. Thus each content area is engaged in multiple forms of literacy through various modes of meaning- making (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic, gestural, and so forth); what my students do inside their classroom practices is intimately tied to the role that literacy plays inside each of their disciplines. Another goal of the course is to encourage students to think about the literacies adolescents bring with them into the classrooms. I want my gradu- ate students to understand that adolescents should not leave their identities (i.e., their multiple literacies) at the classroom door but rather should find ways to engage with school-based literacies that encourage them to integrate

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Page 1: Multimodal Teaching and Learning: Creating Spaces for Content Teachers

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Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(2) October 2008doi:10.1598/JA AL.52.2.5 © 2008 International Reading Association (pp. 144 –153)

Mary ThompsonMultimodal learning

encourages teachers

to think about how to involve

adolescents in looking

at multiple forms of text

to examine what it means

to their identities and beliefs

about the world.

Multimodal Teaching and Learning: Creating Spaces for Content Teachers

What does literacy have to do with content subjects?The graduate students saunter in on the first day of class, some clustering

in small groups of known friends and others sitting alone quietly for a class dubiously titled “Middle Childhood/Adolescent Literacy Methods.” As a lit-eracy professor teaching students majoring in content area subjects, I am fully aware that most of the students staring at me the first day believe that literacy has nothing to do with their content area major and that the class is an un-necessary requirement in their academic program.

My main goal is to deconstruct the myth that literacy is unrelated to so-cial studies, math, and science disciplines and to help my students see the role of literacy as part of their content areas. To do this, my students and I start by redefining what literacy is by taking a sociocultural view that literacy is more than reading and writing (Gee, 1996) of print-based texts to consider the multiple ways we “read” the world around us (Freire, 2000) through various modes of meaning (Kress, 2003). It is through this discussion that the term multimodal literacy ( Jewitt & Kress, 2003) is introduced and ref lected upon. By examining literacy as plural (i.e., literacies), we are able to reconceptualize and reexamine the ways in which literacies are used all around us. For example, graphs are read in math class; various primary documents (including photo-graphs) are examined in social studies curriculum; and results are observed, documented, and hypothesized on using various modes (including visual, kinesthetic, and auditory) in a science laboratory. Thus each content area is engaged in multiple forms of literacy through various modes of meaning-making (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic, gestural, and so forth); what my students do inside their classroom practices is intimately tied to the role that literacy plays inside each of their disciplines.

Another goal of the course is to encourage students to think about the literacies adolescents bring with them into the classrooms. I want my gradu-ate students to understand that adolescents should not leave their identities (i.e., their multiple literacies) at the classroom door but rather should find ways to engage with school-based literacies that encourage them to integrate

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what they know and do out of school with what they do in school. While many scholars have written of this challenge (Hull & Shultz, 2002; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005), it is difficult for my inservice and preservice teachers to think about how to connect their contents with the popular culture, life experiences, and world view of their students.

We discuss the disconnect between in-school and out-of-school literacies from the perspective of the millennial learner (Gee, 2004) and how adolescents today have never known a world without instant mes-saging, iPods, and blogs. I encourage my pre- and in-service teachers to become more familiar with these multimodal texts for reading and writing by assigning a project that has them design their own blog site to interact with popular culture that connects to their content area.

Through this site, teachers share what they pro-duce (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) with their students and classmates to think more broadly about the kinds of texts used in school and to blur the in- and out-of-school boundaries that often restrain what counts as learning inside the classroom. This shows content area teachers how they can better address the kinds of multimodal literacies that adolescents bring with them to classrooms and how these teachers can align their pedagogies with the digital world and context that surrounds them.

Classroom Practice: Integrating Multimodal LiteraciesEncouraging active ref lection and dialogue is the main goal of the course; therefore, I plan the course so that my students engage in how to connect multimodal lit-eracies to adolescents’ lived experiences. To do this, I design several assignments that require my graduate students to step out of their everyday ways of knowing and doing literacies and force them to interact with new kinds of multimodal texts. In the following sec-tion, I describe two such assignments that I use in my classroom: multimodal literature circles (Daniels & Steineke, 2004) and reader response choices (RRCs).

Multimodal Literature CirclesOne assignment I use in my classroom is the multi-modal literature circle, which asks students to read a

text through the role of a story mapper, discussion director, artful artist, practitioner, or investigator. Both in class and out of class—through the use of their blog—students share their thinking about their chosen role and then meet in class to discuss what they decided to do and why.

While these roles are often considered traditional literacies, I want to demystify common perceptions early on that to be multimodal means using and inte-grating technology. While technology is one way to connect outside literacies, it is by far not the only way. The purpose of the assignment is for my students to read the text from multiple perspectives and to make their circle sharing a time to acknowledge how others in class experienced the text. For example, in our class we read Keesha’s House by Helen Frost, a young adult novel written all in poetry about six different teens and their shared experiences of needing a safe place to live as they deal with issues such as domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, and being disowned for their sexual-ity. In each literature role, my students have the free-dom to define their respective roles from their reading of the text and to incorporate a variety of text types into their role to explore literacy multimodally.

To illustrate, the story mapper visually represent-ed the interconnections between the six teens and how their lives crossed in various ways throughout the story by creating a game that enacted the kinds of decisions that each teen considered while making their way to the safe haven of Keesha’s house. The investigator ex-amined the role of safe houses in our area to discover how to find one if a teen is in need and, in doing so, created a virtual teen poster to advertise ways to seek help. The artful artist in another group redefined her role to include music as art and made a compila-tion CD of songs that mirrored the lives of each of the teens and their struggles. One of the discussion direc-tors not only wrote questions to lead her group into a thoughtful conversation of the text but also brought in a clip from the movie Green Card to showcase the struggles and frustration of obtaining a visa, thereby using this media text to add an additional portrait and perspective of one of the teens in her text.

In each role, the objective of engaging in text multimodally was experienced while thinking about the embodied experiences of teens’ out-of-school

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lives and how their lives inf luence what they do in-side classrooms. This assignment is a forerunner to the multimodal lessons and provides a dialogue in class about how each role was defined in different ways de-spite the fact that the text and the assignment were the same. This helps scaffold what multimodal literacies might look like when engaging with a text and helps lead to a conversation about how roles can be defined across different content areas.

To exemplify how content teachers envisioned putting literature roles into their everyday classroom practices, one group discussed how math teachers could use the roles to figure out how to solve a prob-lem, while science could use the roles to collaborate over ways to approach an investigation. Each content area came up with a new list of roles defined specifi-cally for their discipline, and my students focused on how this kind of pedagogy had the potential to bring in adolescents’ experiences and to encourage more ac-tive dialogue and ref lection. The multimodal learn-ing taking place allows students to critically examine how different texts convey meaning, how the modes convey meaning differently, and how texts evoke dif-ferent responses from the reader, writer, listener, and viewer. Table 1 highlights how literature roles can be altered to meet the needs of various content areas.

Reader Response ChoicesI have discovered that my graduate students have become well versed in the ref lective essay response format required in much of graduate school. While

this can be an excellent practice, it often becomes a distilled summary without much critical analysis and synthesis of the various readings and goals of the class. To counteract this trend, I ask my students to create multimodal responses on various readings from the course that correspond to the main themes: multi-modal literacies and adolescent’s lived experiences. I call these reader response choices (RRCs).

In each response, my students are required to show their understanding by creating a product—sometimes picked by the student and sometimes de-fined by me—using one or more of the various modes and then writing about their multimodal choices and how it ref lects their understanding and readings for the week. By doing this, I ask my students to synthe-size their thinking and to bring in questions in their ref lective writing to examine how they came to do what they produced and why. I have been told by several former students that this is one of the hardest forms of writing or creating they have ever had to do as a graduate student because the RRCs require more time to ref lect, synthesize, and think about what they know before they can create a product. Thus, the writing becomes more ref lective and purposeful be-cause it is connected to the thinking process required for crafting each RRC. As the course progresses, my students learn to take risks and become more com-fortable demonstrating their learning and thinking through different modes of meaning-making.

As an illustration, the zine RRC requires each student to create a page for our classroom zine to

Table 1 Examples of Multimodal Literature Roles Across Three Content Areas

Science Math Social studies

Create different genres of songs to go with learning science concepts

Solve problems with multiple modes such as using kinesthetic manipulatives, visual story boards, graphs/tables

Analyze a film by reading each component (e.g., action, semes, talkovers, music, visuals, pacing) to discuss how each component creates meaning

Bring in real life examples such as YouTube clips, CSI clips, newspaper articles, movie clips, popular magazines

Bring real life stories and comments to problems such as using statistics from community to discuss relationship between real life problems and math

Read from one character/perspective; each role represents the characters’ point of view to showcase motive, understanding, and goal

Design a laboratory finding with different modes (e.g., written, visual, kinesthetic)

Use popular culture to present math problems with different modes

Read several different texts that highlight one event to discuss bias and perspectives of each text

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represent their thinking and understanding of class readings on English-language learning adolescents inside classrooms. One student created a conversa-tional text using various symbols to communicate how a student and teacher misread and misunderstood each other’s point of view due to their cultural beliefs and understanding of the material being presented. Another student created a visual representation of signs found at the Mexican–American border to high-light how immigrant crossing is viewed at the border, and she wrote a short poem from the point of view of an immigrant girl almost dying of dehydration cross-ing the desert. All the zine pages are collected and compiled into our online classroom zine to highlight the various ways the readings are understood by and interacted with the diverse disciplines represented within the classroom.

In another RRC, my students are asked to ex-plore various forms of popular culture to find new ways to link it to the lives of their own students as well as to their disciplines. For this, my students are encouraged to produce a webpage or blog of popular culture practices they might link to their content area. This assignment explores critical literacy and how to read the Internet for viable resources. Critical literacy is an essential practice for teachers as the Internet is largely unregulated; teachers need to instruct stu-dents in how to look at available resources critically and how to assess various texts as reliable in this age of digital literacy (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; Lund, 2006; Schmar-Dobler, 2003). It is at this point in the class that we discuss the need to teach students explicit ways to examine texts for bias and to read a text for what is said as well as what is not being said (Pailliotet, Semali, Rodenberg, Giles, & Macaul, 2000). Coiro (2003) posited that

some tasks on the Internet ask readers to extend their use of traditional comprehension skills to new contexts of learning, while others, like electronic searching and tele-collaborative inquiry projects, demand funda-mentally different sets of new literacies not currently covered in most language arts curriculums. (p. 463)

Through this RRC, content teachers discussed what it means to navigate and draw conclusions about various webpages’ accuracy, appropriateness, and timeliness (Roe, Smith, & Burns, 2004).

One math teacher, Sally (all names are pseud-onyms), created a webpage to showcase popular cul-ture in math. On her math webpage, she linked to the popular cartoon The Simpsons and incorporated math-related clips from the show to highlight concepts for her eighth graders. For example, in one episode (season 5, episode 10, titled “$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)”), Homer Simpson recites from memory about triangle inequality and is corrected by a man nearby.

Sally had her students watch this clip and iden-tify the errors in the conversation between Homer and the man as a geometry review before working on their textbook math problems. She later e-mailed me, and she had moved on from just showing clips of math concepts on The Simpsons to having her students produce their own digital movies of math in their ev-eryday lives. One student group in her class produced a digital movie about the geometry of some of the famous buildings in the downtown area, showcasing the link between architecture and geometry.

Sally also informed me via e-mail that her stu-dents are now designing bridges in her class out of everyday materials such as paper clips and wood scraps to learn principles of physics and engineering as they apply to math. This teacher works inside a city school with limited technological resources, but her peda-gogy uses available resources to create a multimodal learning environment. In this case, she uses her own laptop computer hooked up to a television screen to view The Simpsons clip in the classroom, and the stu-dents use everyday objects to build bridges to display their knowledge and understanding of key ideas.

In many classrooms, technology is still limited to one or two computers and an outdated computer laboratory, but teachers are finding ways to integrate multimodal tools in their teaching. It is often assumed that digital technologies are required for multimodal teaching to occur; however, teachers are using ev-eryday tools to bring multimodal thinking into what their students produce and create. It is a new way to think about modes as tools for meaning making rather than what a tech-savvy teacher can do with technology. The math teacher’s interdisciplinary ap-proach to math links many of the course themes of integrating multimodal learning with students outside

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might have potential inside their own teaching. See Table 2 for a sample of RRCs used in the class.

Culminating Content Lesson: Putting Multimodalities Into PracticeThroughout the semester, my graduate students work toward their final project: integrating what they have learned and practiced through literature circles, RRCs, and readings and literacy activities to create a multimodal content lesson and text set that integrates the course objectives of practicing multimodal litera-cies. The culminating lesson is taught in front of their peers for one class period and is accompanied with a text set of other possible lesson texts they would use for a unit of study. The lessons or unit topic can be on any topic chosen by the group. I am struck by the diversity of topics that emerge and find that they rep-resent a range of thoughtful ideas that can be explored through multiple perspectives and texts. For example, topics that have been explored include 9/11, the black plague, Holocaust denial debates, AIDS, and other topics that push at what is possible inside classrooms.

literacies, making learning more relevant and engag-ing. In the teachers’ e-mail update to me she shared the following:

I never would have thought about math outside the textbook and thought I would be teaching this way if it wasn’t for a class on literacy—it surprises even me but it really works and I am the envy of my depart-ment because everyone wants to know why my kids are so excited to do math. I explain how they are more engaged and see how their learning is connected to other parts of their lives the teachers look at me like I’m nuts.

In all of the RRCs over the course of the semes-ter, my graduate students are actively engaging with how to incorporate multimodal literacies so that they can more effectively and purposefully create peda-gogy that is relevant to the students they teach. This practice also encourages my students to use some of the popular culture from their RRCs in their group content lesson. Each assignment is purposeful in that it encourages the students to practice, ref lect, and cre-ate multimodal texts to consider how these other texts

Table 2 List of RRCs

RRC Description Goal(s)

Connecting multimodality with new literacies Create a multimodal product connecting your content to the theory and activities in class.

Put theory into practice by thinking about what multimodality and multiliteracies mean to thinking about teaching and learning specific to their content area.

Vocabulary and comprehension strategies Create a strategy to use with students that explores how to work on comprehension and vocabulary development within your content area.

Critically examine content literacies and the ways all content teachers are responsible for teaching strategies within their discipline to assist with vocabulary and comprehension of novel ideas.

Language, diversity, and identity Create a zine page to showcase your thinking about issues surrounding language diversity and the identity around the adolescents you teach.

Creating a zine page is required because it forces teachers to create something usually outside their comfort zone. We also examine real-world examples and the political messages embedded within many student-made zines and compile all zine-pages to read and reflect on the classroom zine and how different content teachers responded.

English-language learners Create a way to think about what a border crossing entails. Create a product of your choice that showcases your understanding of the experience of what it means to think from a perspective/worldview other than your own.

Understanding what it means to be a language learner is hard to grasp for many teachers. I teach one class in Japanese as a way to lead into this RRC to discuss metaphorical and real borders.

Popular culture and critical literacy Create a blog or website to showcase popular culture, media and its possible use inside your content area.

Examine popular culture, critical media literacy inside their teaching to broaden what counts as text inside the classroom.

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and how to think about the events this way. I think it was more refreshing this way. All of the group mem-bers helped in creating a text set that ref lects multiple literacies and all of the “texts” are things that I would say are not only appropriate in a secondary classroom, but highly relevant to adolescents and should be in-cluded inside our classrooms.

As Sue noted, the group spanned several content areas and used their expertise from their contents to showcase a point of view of war that is often ignored inside the secondary classroom. This was an asset the group capitalized upon as they found ways to integrate new kinds of textual representations of war often not included inside the classroom such as music, media clips, and poetry (see Table 3 for a list of the group’s resources). All digital resources were used fairly and legally for all content lessons and RRCs. In class, much time is devoted to discussing fair use of digi-tal media and online sources so that the teachers can enhance their repertoire of text resources while being cognizant of copyright issues with online resources.

The group presented their lesson on the war in Iraq following the lesson plan shown in Table 4. The presentation ref lected several sides of the war in Iraq to be mindful of their classmates’ own feelings on the subject. Asking students to think about the war from a side they may or may not agree with was a central objective in their teaching. They worked to do this by using the various kinds of multimodal literacies listed in Table 3 to help the students think about how photographs, poems, song lyrics, and media help con-struct our understandings and beliefs about the Iraq war. It also shows the diversity of perspectives and how critical pedagogy was integrated fully into their thinking.

At the end of their lesson, the group asked every-one in class to form an inner and outer circle where students were invited to share something they ex-perienced, felt, questioned, or wondered about. The class was overf lowing with emotion as they engaged in interactive and passionate discussions representing a range of opinions and beliefs. Everyone had some-thing to say and every perspective was given voice. The group’s objective—to realize multiple perspec-tives through multimodal meaning making—was achieved. I asked the class to ref lect upon the course

I now turn to examine one such unit by a group of students who created a lesson and multimodal text set on the war in Iraq. This unit was chosen by the group because it ref lects a commitment to risk taking and multimodal literacies.

Multiple Perspectives on the War in IraqThe war in Iraq group was composed of five graduate students, each from a different content area: English, drama education, math, music education, and eco-nomics. They came together during the second week of class and began brainstorming ideas for their group content lesson. The group content lesson is one of the most difficult aspects and many groups struggle with how to think about a topic that could merge their in-terests while also working toward a multidisciplinary perspective. I asked the group how they decided on tackling the war in Iraq for their content lesson and multimodal text set. One student in the content group, Erica, shared,

To be honest, we all really had never considered in-troducing such a controversial issue, such as the Iraq War, into the classroom before this assignment. After thinking about several “hot button” topics and what we had all been talking about that week—we just started to think the war could really push us past our comfort zone and force us to think about how to in-clude other perspectives. After preparing this lesson with my group members, I can see that it is important to discuss such issues because they have affected ev-eryone in some way. However, a teacher must remain open and present multiple sides and perspective as we attempted to do.

The group also shared what it was like to work across content areas to teach a topic that looked outside the traditional content lens. This aspect was particu-larly notable because no one in their group represented the social studies or history content area. I asked them to talk about how they dealt with this aspect from a planning and conceptual stage. Sue explained,

There were so many benefits to having a group that spanned across contents because we were able to offer students a discussion that embraced multiple perspec-tives from English to Math to Music. I know you were surprised that we didn’t have a history perspective with our topic but we really saw this as an asset because it really made us look at the topic from what we do know

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Table 3 War Group’s Multimodal Resources

Text type Resources Synopsis Modes highlighted Pedagogical purposes

Poem Nye, Naomi. (2002). 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.

The voices and emotions of the Middle East and the Arab-American experience after 9/11

Text Gives the reader multiple perspectives in times of war and uncertainty andbegins a writing unit on poetry through historical personae

Songs Keith, T. (2002). Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue. On Unleashed.

The importance of the American flag and need for the United States to fight back against the threat of terrorists

Auditory Demonstrates one perspective of the war, pro-war expression

Green Day. (2005). Wake Me Up When September Ends. On American Idiot.

Describes how even though one year has passed after 9/11, everything still seems the same, still fighting a war

Demonstrates one perspective of the war, anti-war expression

Nonfiction Ahmedia, Harah. (2005). The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky

A memoir about a young Afghan girl whose childhood is tragically altered as war erupts in her country

Text Helps students relate to the civilians of a war-torn nation

News article Worldwide demonstrations show divided opinions from www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/15/war.rallies/index.html

Presents the diverse and divided opinions around the world with regards to the War in Iraq

Text Presents students with both sides (pro- and anti-war) with quotes from politicians to citizens

Film Frontline: Truth, War and Consequences from www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/

Provides videos, including interviews, rationales for war, what went wrong, and what is at stake in Iraq

Visual, auditory Shows the history and consequences of the war in Iraq, providing insight into how it has affected people of different culture

Hearing Impaired fromhttp://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=124359&title=mess

The news about the War in Iraq with a humorist twist

Visual, auditory Shows the effects of media on war and the multiple complexities that war entails

Political cartoon Oil for Blood? from politicalhumor.about.com/od/iraqcomicstrips/index.htm

Depicts a satirical examination of how the Bush administration has been handling both the War in Iraq and the concept of patriotism

Visual,text

Shows the satirical beliefs on the War in Iraq and provides a source of critical thinking and opinions

Blogs Iraq Pictures fromwww.iraqpictures.blogspot.com

Deals with image, emotion and real life stories from the Middle East

Visual, auditory, text

Provides students opportunity to read about live accounts from the war zoneHealing Iraq from

www.healingiraq.blogspot.com

Informational websites

Cost of War, National Priorities Project: Turning Data Into Action fromwww.nationalpriorities.org

Shows a running total of the cost of the Iraq War and lets user compare the cost to other social programs in U.S.

Visual Provides students with a financial perspectives of the Iraq War

War Report, Project on Defense Alternatives fromwww.comw.org/warreport

A collection of current newspaper articles and interviews with military generals concerning the War in Iraq

Visual,text

Serves as a reference resource for the lesson on the Iraq War with current information

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ways to create meaning in my classroom and for that, I am both annoyed and very grateful.

Teachers like Isabel experienced firsthand what it means to be a learner, a collaborator, and a problem solver with classmates from several content specialties. She learned how to strengthen her teaching ability by incorporating adolescent culture and multiple content perspectives using multimodal resources to enhance teaching.

Putting Multimodal Texts Into Practice In the ClassroomBy exploring what it means to use multimodal texts in teaching and learning, the graduate students en-rolled in Middle Childhood/Adolescent Literacy Methods gained a new understanding and apprecia-tion for what literacy means from a multimodal per-spective and how to use it more effectively in their respective disciplines. I end the class by asking them to think about how to make multimodal texts a part

goals and their content lesson in their final essay. Isabel

shared the following in her written ref lection:

I came into the classroom believing that I was an ac-tive teacher who taught from many perspectives and I walk out realizing that my understanding and grasp of multimodality was limited and now has grown. I came into the classroom believing that students were not mentally active and I walk out realizing that I was looking in the wrong places. I came into the class-room thinking that as a new English teacher, literacy was more my problem to address than other content areas and I walk out realizing that all teachers across the board, have to address the problem together. The goal is to teach the new generations of students and therefore, the teacher needs to figure out how to reach them and not expect the students to mold into the teacher’s traditional methods. The classroom is a place of learning, but to do so all students need to be seen as equal and important members who bring in their own personal knowledge and abilities. A classroom that can embrace this idea is a classroom where learning can thrive. And it is because of our experiences doing mul-timodal literacies I will never stop thinking of new

Table 4 War Group’s Lesson Plan

Layout of lesson Activity Modes highlighted Content focus

Opening n Introduce the topicn View a video clip and listen to a songn Complete Venn Diagram comparing and

contrasting the perspectives presented in the video and the song

Visual, auditory, linguistic Social studies (current events)

Main

Activity

Station 1 n Examine song lyricsn Create symbolic collages representing

one songn Share students’ creation

Visual, auditory, linguistic Music, art

Station 2 n Examine the cost of war based on the National Priorities website

n Compare the cost of war to American social programs (e.g., public education)

n Design a budget for rebuilding Baghdad

Visual, auditory, linguistic Math, economics

Station 3 n Read Naomi Nye’s poem, All things not considered

n Foster discussion about the poemn Write a historical personae poem

Linguistic, visual, auditory English

Closing n Conversation metaphor activityn Discuss students’ experience throughout

the lesson

Auditory, kinesthetic (gestural) Drama education

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of their everyday teaching and to discuss how learning multimodally is important. While the experience in class was inspiring for many, I ask them to ref lect on how to do this kind of teaching in the “real world” of high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum.

Turner, a math teacher, explained,

I guess we all have a choice about the environment we create. I know I was taught math the drill and skill way. I loved math so much it didn’t matter but I know many of my students won’t feel this way. In our con-tent lesson I learned how to think differently about my content. It is a rare for me as a math teacher to plan and coordinate with non math majors—so this class really forced me out of my own comfort zone. I discovered that the things I take for granted in my content are not so for others. When I had to think about the math side of our lesson on discrimination of Arab-Americans post 9/11—I had to think about how to look at numbers to problem solve who is checked at airport security and who is not. This was powerful and taught me how math can be so much more related to everyday circumstances and events in students’ lives.

What I find important in Turner’s comments is how he got a broader perspective of his content by working with non-math people in his planning. Moreover, Turner explores what it means to make a student-focused environment in his classroom to sup-port learning by using real-world examples of math they are learning in class. I recently e-mailed several consenting former students to see how they are in-tegrating multimodal learning in their classrooms. Turner e-mailed me the next day with the story of one student. Here is part of that story that exemplifies how he now thinks about multimodal teaching inside his classroom:

One day, one of my students brought a clipping show-ing the regents pass rate in our district. The table showed how poorly African American students in our district do on the test and the article highlighted this. The student has never thought about testing in this way and asked that we discuss it in class and talk about race and testing from the data in the article. It sparked a heated discussion, but the result was an impassioned group of tenth graders talking about math in a critical way. It was the first time I think many of them saw math connected to real people. They made graphs in groups and re-interpreted the data showing that math has bias too. I shared this with my colleague in social

studies and he is integrated it into his unit. I saw my students doing things with the material—manipu-lating data, creating graphs, sharing results, debating numbers it was marvelous.

In the above e-mail, Turner explains that mul-timodal teaching means giving students voice in the kinds of questions they ask and the tools to compose new ways of thinking and understanding materials be-ing presented. It goes beyond engagement to consider what it means to have students interpret data from dif-ferent perspectives and critically question results that are often masked as the only truth. In the end, it taught his 10th-grade students that math, like all subjects, has bias, and unpacking the numbers and what they repre-sented gave them power to use multimodal resources to tell a different story—one that shares their identities as African American learners in the same district.

Through the course, my graduate students saw that each discipline could find ways to make chang-es for the adolescents they teach. In doing so, each teacher began to feel more connected to the overall course themes and goals of creating multimodal expe-riences in their teaching and the learning taking place inside their classrooms. Additionally, they discovered that literacy is not the job of the English teacher or the grade school elementary teacher but an ongoing process for all content teachers. The content lesson and multimodal teaching expanded notions of what is possible inside their classrooms and had them explore a different point of view. The culminating multimod-al lessons shared inside the classroom brought students together from different content areas and encouraged cross-curricular planning back in their schools. The multimodal learning encouraged teachers to think about how to involve adolescents in looking at mul-tiple forms of text to examine what it means to their identities and beliefs about the world.

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Thompson teaches at the University at Buffalo—SUNY,

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