Integrating Multiliteracies into the Classroom
If composition instructors consider the opportunities multimodality provides students, they should also see the ways in which their students will develop multiliteracies through their multimodal work. Again drawing from Kelli Cargile Cook's "Layered Literacies: A Theoretical Framework for Technical Communication Pedagogy," I explain the importance and usefulness of integrating multiliteracies into the classroom.
Basic Literacy
Assists students in
Rhetorical
Assists students in
Assists students in
Technological
Assists students in
Ethical
Assists students in
Critical
Assists students in
This list shows the variety of skills, knowledge making, and meaning making students will engage in when instructors incorporate and encourage multiple literacies in the classroom. Now that I have established why composition instructors should include multiliteracies and multimodality in their classrooms, I offer put forth a case for using Tumblr as a means to engage students with multimodality and to develop multiliteracies. In the "Tumblr" tab I explain the platform and then provide explicit connections between Tumblr and multimodality and multiliteracies in the drop-down tab.
Basic Literacy
Assists students in
- "making appropriate reader-based decisions about data presentation, document form, and document construction"
- "engaging readers through effective and appropriate reader-based writing techniques"
- "making informed decisions about usage, grammar, mechanics, styles, and graphic representations based on knowledge of readers and writing situations" (9)
Rhetorical
Assists students in
- "understanding of the audience’s role in shaping effective discourse"
- gaining "knowledge of and the abilities to choose and apply invention strategies, depending upon specific audience, purpose, and writing situation"
- "employing different kinds of research strategies ... to show how well they can manage complex information structures in order to create a persuasive and argumentatively sound document" (10)
Assists students in
- "working effectively with others in a variety of capacities--as members of a document cycling team, for example, or as individual
collaborators who support another writer’s inventional processes" - "articulating the rhetorical audience" by being an "involved audience"
- "recogniz[ing] discourse communities’ social conventions and expectations for document design and graphical display of information" (11-12)
Technological
Assists students in
- developing "a working knowledge of technologies that helps professional communicators to produce communications, documents, or products"
- fostering "an awareness of how these technologies promote social interaction and collaboration"
- learning "to research how users work with technologies" (13)
Ethical
Assists students in
- "mak[ing] decisions about our documents’ purposes, audience, contents (both textual and visual), development, and delivery methods"
- "enhanc[ing their] abilities to make decisions that are grounded in the profession’s ethical principles"
- "enhanc[ing] their decision making by making them more cognizant of ethical implications of their decisions, including their responsibilities as citizens and workers in their society" (15-16)
Critical
Assists students in
- "recogniz[ing] and consider[ing] ideological stances and power structures and the willingness to take action to assist those in need"
- developing an "awareness of the effects of technologies within human contexts"
- pursuing "reflection, critique, and action" (16-17)
This list shows the variety of skills, knowledge making, and meaning making students will engage in when instructors incorporate and encourage multiple literacies in the classroom. Now that I have established why composition instructors should include multiliteracies and multimodality in their classrooms, I offer put forth a case for using Tumblr as a means to engage students with multimodality and to develop multiliteracies. In the "Tumblr" tab I explain the platform and then provide explicit connections between Tumblr and multimodality and multiliteracies in the drop-down tab.