Multimodal Composition

 For Unit 2, we had covered Multimodal Composition. I think that this is such an eye-opening way, as a Secondary Education English major, to new teaching horizons. Even though literature was the "dominant" mode of teaching, it surprises me that no educators took advantage of teaching through technology and different modes while I was in high school.

To begin, I want to focus on the article "Modernizing Shakespeare with Multimodal Learning Stations", and in particular the Immersion section. Shakespeare, when I was learning it, was not something I particularly enjoyed. In the article, Virtual Reality was used in one of the stations. After only two days of this station, some students were saying "If there was a Shakespeare game, I'd play it" and "I heard we'll be performing scenes later. It would be fun to do them in VR". Taking things that students are already familiar with, or interested in, is a perfect way to spike engagement. I really liked this portion of the article because of how clearly the students were excited by learning through audio and visuals. Even with more anxiety inducing activities like acting out scenes in front of peers they felt more inclined to do so with this new mode. I want to be able to promote this level of learning interest in my own classroom so that students are excited to come to school each day.

Another portion of the unit, that was a direct multimodal engagement for us as students, was the Graphic Representation of a Novel assignment. This assignment was a great look into student engagement through different a different method that not only worked for us as college students, but also could be a bridge for younger students to higher literacy. Allowing us to take a piece of literature that we personally found interesting made me super excited to do the "project". Not only did it use the linguistic form, but it also introduced the visual way of learning. Having this new creative outlet, mixed with traditional literature learning, definitely made this assignment way more enjoyable. I loved being able to interpret The Tell-Tale Heart, one of my favorite short stories, into art. If I am intrigued by this, I can guarantee students at a younger age level will be thrilled to mesh learning practices and interests into their schooling.