Digital Multimodal Literacies, 2004 - 2012: A Digital Storytelling Project

Jason: Welcome to our digital story about the exciting evolution of computer pedagogies from 2004 to 2012. In this era, teachers continued experimenting with email, word processing, discussion boards, website evaluation, and desktop publishing. But the real new kids in town were multimodal composing and web 2.0 applications. Although the computer usually played a role in these new multimodal pedagogies, students were using a range of technologies for crafting multimodal  texts. These included audio recorders, digital still and video cameras, smart phones, drawing pencils and more. And students were publishing their work not just on stand-alone websites, but on a variety of online platforms with robust multimodal capabilities, from blogs, to wikis, to YouTube and beyond! At this moment, we finally see the multimedia computer dreams of the 60s coming  true, but this time students were doing all the making. And that made all the difference!

Ben: The multimodal turn in English Journal really kicked off in 2004 with an article about digital storytelling by Sara Kajder. Students in Kajder's class told personal stories about their lives that combined vocal narration with still photos and a musical soundtrack to create a video that was published straight to compact disc. As part of the process, students composed multimodal storyboards to help them make conscious rhetorical choices about how they were layering image, voice, and music, engaging in a recursive process of reflection that remains crucial for multimodal composing assignments to this day. With the rise of podcasting, we saw a renewed emphasis on students telling their own stories with their own embodied voices.

Ben: In 2010, Goodson and Skillen discussed a project in which students created podcasts, where they documented their own experiences of rural living complete with sound effects and music. Here we can see how digital audio technologies breathed new life into public audio composing pedagogies that date all the way back to the 1930s.

Jason: We also noticed a surge of interest in comics and animation that teachers connected to computer literacy. Using programs such as Comic Life, students were making their own comics, combining hand-drawn visuals with images culled from the web. And, in one our favorite articles, an English, a Social Studies, and a Visual Arts teacher taught a collaborative unit about the anime film, Spirited Away, focusing on its rhetorical choices, social contexts, and environmental themes. For the final project, students worked in both their English and Art classes to craft their own animated shorts tackling local environmental issues. Students composed their animated movies by taking photos of hand-crafted scenes and then combining them in a digital video editor. Here was another case of teachers embracing a hacker ethic of repurposing everyday objects for multimodal composition.

Jason: As the 21st century really started rolling, student website projects also grew increasingly multimodal. In 2007, Jeff House's class built a multimedia website about The Grapes of Wrath. Not only did the website share archival materials from the 1930s, but students also created photographic and video content that argued on behalf of farmer worker rights and migrant justice in California, including footage of 2006 immigration reform protests. Students taking action on the web and in the streets...that's the kind of digital humanities pedagogy we need today!

Ben: Interest in web-publishing was further ramped up by the rise of free blogging software that made web composing simpler (though a little more constrained). Facebook was mentioned regularly in articles after 2008, though teachers mostly weren't bringing it directly into classrooms. For example, Gibbons noted that Facebook was blocked by his school's internet filter, so he turned to wiki writing as a different way of bringing social media composing into his classroom.

Ben: In addition to promoting online collaboration, the rise of wikis also provoked  new worries about digital misinformation. While many teachers were arguing that Wikipedia should be banned as a source, teachers like Darren Crovitz and W. Scott Smoot suggested that students should engage in collaboratively researching and authoring their own Wikipedia articles as way of developing a critical understanding of the site.

Ben: With all the excitement about new multimodal web 2.0 technologies, we noted that most articles in this period didn't situate their digital pedagogies in relation to older technologies like radio, television, film, and early hypermedia--they tended to frame multimodal composing as solely a twenty-first century phenomenon.

Jason: But, the 100-year anniversary of the journal in 2012 provoked some much-needed historical reflection. In "Same as It Ever Was: Enacting the Promise of Teaching, Writing, and New Media" Hicks, Young, Kajder, and Hunt made a compelling call for teachers to dig deeper into the history of using technology in the English classroom. Knowing that history, the authors argued, would ultimately help teachers make more effective and innovative use of current technologies. We leave you with a quote from this essay that has been inspirational for our entire project:

Ben: If we had but one sentiment to share with readers of this article, this would most likely be it: Stop waiting for the technology of tomorrow to compel you to do the work of today. [...] We have the opportunity to learn from the history of English Journal authors, to see what they've noted, and to understand that we, right now, can make important changes. (Hicks et al., 2012)

Jason: We couldn't agree more!

[Closing credits: Images, audio, and video content used in this digital storytelling project are either sourced from Creative Commons-Licensed sites, original content, or used in accordance with our Statement of Fair Use. For a complete list of items included here, please see the Appendix of this book.]