Understanding Multimodality: Dealing with Alphabetical and Visual Text

As Gunther Kress argues in Literacy in the New Media Age, the screen and the image have now replaced the book and written word as the dominant means of communication. Throughout the book, he explores how these changes will affect the future of literacy. Kress explains:

It is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from a vast array of social, technological, and economic factors. Two distinct yet related factors deserve to be particularly highlighted. These are, on the one hand, the broad move from the now centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance of the image, on the other hand, the move from the dominance of the medium of the book to the dominance of the medium of the screen. These two together are producing a revolution in the uses and effects of literacy and of associated means for representing and communicating at every level and at every domain (1).

For those who agree with Kress, as I do, that we have entered the age of the screen, then we must acknowledge that there exists the opportunity in the composition classroom for student projects that blend word with image. Technology makes the boundaries for such projects almost limitless in scope. Students can produce slide shows, movies, digital scrapbooks or collages, commercials, music videos, and numerous other compositions, all of which combine a variety of modes including: audio, image, and text. Bringing these multimodal projects into the classroom allows students to examine the relationship between multiple modes and utilize the available media of the twenty-first century, which they will be forced to deal with when they leave the university, to communicate with their intended audience. My goal here is to show a variety of technologies (blogs, visual essays, electronic portfolios) I incorporate into my composition classroom and the ways in which I find them to be valuable to my own students. I do this in hopes to extend the conversation across the discipline about current and, possibly, new ways to utilize the technologies of the twenty-first century to allow our students to develop new literacies and communicate within the social, cultural, and political contexts they exist in.