Multimodal Communications

http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/visual/dufflemeyer_ellerston.cfm

Communications Across the Curriculum (CAC)

21st Century definition of literacy:

To be literate in the twenty-first century means possessing the skills necessary to effectively construct and comfortably navigate multiplicity, to manipulate and critique information, representations, knowledge, and arguments in multiple media from a wide range of sources, and to use multiple expressive technologies including those offered by print, visual, and digital tools (Sean Williams, 2001, p. 22).

Definition of Visual Culture:
Visual culture is not limited to the study of images or media, but extends to everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that we take to be immediate and unmediated (Mitchell, 2002, p. 170).

Definition of critical literacy:
critical literacy can be defined as the ability to see text (in this case, particularly visual text), not as a transparent window on reality, but as constructed from a viewpoint, with someone's communicative purpose and a calculated effect in mind.

Kathleen Welch (1999) states:

students should have the opportunity "to interpret and analyze electronic and visual texts as a means to understand our culture's "articulation and power" (p. 134).

Hill (2004) argues that:
all students should be educated in visual rhetoric

Mary Hocks (2003) argues that, specifically, this rhetorical education should mean "students ... learn the 'distanced' process of how to critique the saturated visual and technological landscape that surrounds them as something structured and written in a set of deliberate rhetorical moves" (p. 645).

W. J. T. Mitchell (2002) calls on us to help students critically negotiate our visual culture by "overcom[ing] the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn it into a problem for analysis ... " (p. 166, emphasis added).

We agree with new media and critical literacy theorists who say that
[... ] education [should] concentrate, not on the transfer of information nor on the reproduction of value systems, but on the urgent task of equipping people with the necessary "thinking tools" to make sense of historical processes so that individuals may become better at assessing the "likely" verisimilitude of any account or representation of the world. (Willeman, 2002, p. 20)

"customary distinctions" between the visual and the verbal are no longer useful (a point that W. J. T. Mitchell also makes in his 1992 Picture Theory) and that we have an opportunity, in this communication environment, to "produce more critical forms of consciousness" (Stroupe, 2000, p. 609).

Logan (2002) when he notes that digital possibilities for generating and receiving texts, both visual and verbal, "not only change social patterns but they also affect the psyche and the ways in which people think and learn by creating a new sensory bias and hence a new cognitive style" (p. 13).

Ann Marie Seward Barry (1997) explores in detail in her Visual Intelligence, providing evidence that when we receive multiple, fast, intense, and engrossing messages in our media environment, we suspend analysis and enter a state very like daydreaming: "we become emotionally but not logically involved in the medium, and images stream into our psyche, accepted without critical analysis" (pp. 172-173). (Is a tool in analysic multiple viewings?)

FOR PREFACE: we are concerned about overlooking new methods of composing—methods which fundamentally rely on a mix of the visual, the verbal, motion, and even the aural—that offer students both composing and interpretation opportunities that more closely mirror those surrounding us in the media environment today.

Diana George (2002) makes an important argument for a reexamination of visual communication's place as a part of the necessary literacy skills of our students (p. 14), looking at how communication instructors might go about asking students to create visual arguments in a way that does not necessarily preference either images or text

students do not, for the most part, develop an understanding of the world through conventional and exclusively written or spoken text because our culture's stories and supposed solutions to problems reach us in new ways.

we believe the fact that it is a culture of visuals (and text) in motion, as opposed to the photographic images of a magazine, is extremely important to those of us concerned with helping CAC students compose and critically interpret text.

All of it comes to us in the form of less text, more visuals, moving backgrounds and footage, ticker tapes, and background music, and it is presented as if it is objective and complete information, offered solely for our education and not for any other reason. Our students receive and interpret these kaleidoscopically and heavily visual texts as "natural, unstructured, transparent replicas of reality ... " (Gregory Veen, 1998), when in fact they fit perfectly into Postman's (1970, p. 161) definition of structured message systems which assign us a role to play, feelings to feel, and thoughts to think.

when hypertext remains the primary opportunity for electronic and visual composing we offer to our students, they may come to "confuse the ability to link materials with intellectual enrichment, subscribing to the idea that saying all that you know (or linking as much as you can find) about a topic is better than selecting your evidence based on an analysis of your reader's questions, knowledge, and needs" (pp. 29-30).

multimedia composing process helps students see the rhetorical importance of the unity and coherence of the full composition because students' attention is directed to images and other elements (e.g., sound, motion) not only "as individual carriers of meaning [but] to the ways in which the meaning of the composition in which they appear is conditioned by their combined synthesis ... . [they] are consciously arranged to convey a particular message" (Veen, 1998, emphasis added).

when students reflect on the very deliberate process they have engaged in to choose a particular image and to place it into the composition in a particular way (at a chosen juncture, certain speed, with particular transitioning moves, and with particular music or verbal text accompanying it), that "image has forever lost any semblance of being objective, non-coded, neutral. Its structured status is literalized" (Veen, 1998). Mitchell's ideological veil has been pulled aside.

Multimodal composition using flash, moviemaker, Imovie...to provide a successful multimodal composing experience for instructors and students which would then offer the opportunity for critical reflection on those texts

Digital portfolios

Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage (1989, c1967). This book serves two purposes in that not only is it an introduction to ways of looking at media, but it also provides a design template where visual and verbal information are brought together creatively.

hallmarks of a critically literate person in this multimedia environment in which we live:
Understanding that a text is not a transparent window on reality, but is constructed; this understanding grows out of the students' awareness of the message they wish to relay in their composition and the multimodally rhetorical moves they make to accomplish that, and then extends to recognizing the same is true for other texts they encounter in their communication environment;

Developing and demonstrating rhetorical awareness both as a composer of text and as a reader of text (e.g., using the features and methods available to them in their composing environment to, as Janangelo (1998) says, focus, select, and strategically present their ideas; conveying a specific thesis, or message, in a way that is relatively unambiguous; paying attention to transitions and cohesion in the composition, as opposed to simple accretion of links to be followed randomly); and

Developing agency as a communicator and as a reader, rather than opting for the passivity that our popular media environment makes so easy; developing the willingness and the ability to interrupt a familiar cultural story and contribute their own ideas to it, thus complicating it and making it more meaningful for them.

By omitting or shortchanging multimodal forms of composing in our pedagogy, Welch 1999 says we promote a duality which implicitly tells students that print discourse is for "school culture" and that "school discourse is not a place to pour out one's passions" (p. 159).

Music videos use the structure and lyrics of song to help create unity and cohesion and thus to underscore the message

Use of symbols, logos to convey meaning

Mini-Operas

composing in this communication environment urges the author to be aware of the features of the software and how his/her decisions about material (visuals, music, voices, printed words) and organization (arrangement, transitions, timing/speed) will affect how successfully his message as a whole is conveyed

Agency as a communicator and a reader: potential to use composing to re-see something that has already been structured and presented to us in the popular media in a particular way

Conclusion: a professional imperative" to create opportunities for critical literacy development in our classrooms (p. 261), we urge composition instructors to welcome these multimodal forms of composing text, not as trivial, chaotic, meaningless, plebian, MTV-like assaults of sensory material that we can ignore and go back to our "business" of teaching folks to read and write like we were taught to read and write. Our business has changed because our information environment has changed, and we fulfill the professional imperative we all believe in when we persuade students of the importance of—and give them ways of—pushing past the appearance of transparency in text.