Unit 2 Reflection - Multimodal Composition

 What is Multimodal Composition?

Welcome back again! 

I hope you're all doing well, and having a wonderful semester so far!

To get on track here, multimodal composition was definitely another word I knew absolutely nothing about! When we first started talking about it, I assumed it meant just using multiple types of learning tools, and to a point I wasn't wrong, but I didn't really understand the complexity of the term. After learning a little more about it through reading, I can confidently say that multimodal composition is the act of teaching using multiple forms of learning, whether that be visual, auditory, physical, musical, mathematic, and social. 

Its using the different ways people learn to teach, and doing some of them at the same time to hopefully make learning easy to understand and fun to a point! 

This was made the clearest through the article called "Modernizing Shakespeare with Multimodal Learning Stations", where teachers set up multiple stations to get kids introduced to Shakespeare in a non stressful and fun way. One of the best examples was combining Shakespeare and VR, allowing students to be immersed in the world of shakespeare through his theaters. 

A quote that i liked a lot was when a student said "If there was a shakespeare game I would play it." Sometimes shakespeare seems very inaccessible, because the language in it seems very foreign to us, and the idea of reading shakespeare is such a big deal that a lot of students seem intimidated by it. By cominind shakespeare with something familiar, like video games and virtual reality, it made shakespeare feel less scary and overwhelming. It made learning it accessible to people who might not want to learn it, or be hesitant to learn it. 

Why is Multimodal Composition important?

Well, I basically said it above. It makes knowledge more accessible to people who can't learn by lectures and writings. It allows students to use the world and things around them to explain and understand the stories of the past, and allows them to enjoy and understand classics in a way that has never been done before. 

Now, for a moment I'm going to get a little defensive of classics, because i actually enjoy most of them. I do believe this is a way to make classics understandable, and show students why they need to at least know these books and understand them. The article "Nobody Wants to Read Anymore" kind of dunks on classics and how they're taught in school, and blaming those old "canon books" for ruining peoples love for reading. 

I can say from personal experience and from the experience of my peers that I believe that mindset is kind of full of crap. 

Let me explain- 

It's not the classics that are the problem, its how they're being taught. And that's why multimodal composition in teaching is so important. For instance, when i read "Lord of the Flies" in 10th grade we got a chance to engage in a socratic seminar and discuss how we think good and evil works, and how it is explained in the world of "Lord of the Flies." For once in my whole school life, the teacher didn't chat with us, it was all of us talking to each other, and none of us were right or wrong, but we were sharing and explaining to each other how we felt in a very constructive and wholesome way. We were just listening to each other, and through writings and drawings and chatting we all came up with the conclusion that there is no definition of good and evil, because those words are so personal. We got to the main idea of the book, and discussed it like adults, without our teacher ever saying a word. 

Another thing we did in my 8th grade class was when we read "A Midsummer Nights Dream", we assigned parts for people who wanted to read, we set up the classroom like a Shakespearian theater, and then us kids would act out the scenes as we believed they should be acted out, and we were asked to explain our choices, and oddly shakespeare became a fun dissecting game, where the class was trying to figure out how our movements and actions matched the words, and it made shakespeare way more fun. 

Blaming the books is the same logic as blaming violent video games for making people violent. Classics are fascinating in their own way, they just cant be presented as these daunting, larger than life stories. Also, this logic beats down classics that were written by women, like "Uncle Toms Cabin" and "Frankenstein". Classics are everywhere, there are classics written by minorities, and people of color, and let us not forget that the Icon Oscar Wilde was gay and his books "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "A Picture of Dorian Gray" are also classics. 

Say it with me again, CLASSICS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM, HOW THEY ARE TAUGHT IS THE PROBLEM.

Now that my rant is over, I do believe more modern books should be taught in schools as well. For instance, I read "Station Eleven" in 12th grade, and I think books like "The Road", "Normal People", "Gone Girl", and so many other modern day classics should be taught and shared in the classroom. Make classrooms like book clubs! Allow your students to pick a book to read for the semester, allow students to share with their teachers what kids are reading today, and if school appropriate, teach it in class. Classics can, and should, be taught beside modern books, because books are books. How old they are doesnt make them better, it's the effects they had on society and the world, or how their stories transcend time, is what makes them a classic. 

How am I going to use Multimodal Composition in my Classroom?

There's one type of multimodal learning that i loved the most, and it was absolutely Processed Drama. 

As a theater kid, and my second major being in teacher, i want to find ways for students in my class to engage with theater and find it fun, and I believe processed drama in the classroom is the perfect way to do that! 

I actually found some very fun theater exercises to use in school as well, and I believe a lot of these can be used in the contexts of books students are writing as well, and ill link them here! 

https://www.teachingexpertise.com/classroom-ideas/drama-activities-for-middle-school/

https://brainninjas.ca/ways-to-teach-drama/

And one exercise i found really fun in class was the one we did for vocabulary. One part of english class i always hated was vocab, and i find the exercise we did where we did a freeze frame to explain a word and the have people guess it is a really amazing way to get students to show they understand what a word means without testing them! 

And the partner interactions for the poems as well, especially when you're playing the role of a character with a small group of people allow students to feel safe, but also show they understand what the poem was about with no writing involved! 

I don't have any art to share this time with you all, but i do have some cool fanart based of my favorite classic book "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and My Hyde" to end this off with!