Amanda Torres
Lecturer, English
The shift to remote learning incited by the COVID-19 pandemic asked instructors to radically reconsider our pedagogicalpractices for an online space. This move was met with valid worries and hesitation about what would be lost from theclassroom learning experience with less emphasis on what would be gained from the digital learning experience. Fortunately,one of the many affordances of online learning is the ability to incorporate multimodality for projects and classwork.Multimodal assignments integrate different modes of activity, encouraging students to participate and engage with materialmore deeply. For writing and literature instructors, specifically, multimodality can introduce new practices for close readingand text-based analysis enabled through collaborative production of visual media online. Transmediation, or applying“understanding from one sign system and moving it into another in order to generate meaning” (qtd. in Batchelor 69) can be an especially generative practice to facilitate close reading, collaboration, analysis, brainstorming, and revision.
As transmediating is a process of deriving meaning through creation, it is a flexible practice that invites creation of allkinds of media from comics to podcasts to video essays. One of the most approachable modes of transmediating in anonline classroom involves asking students to draw, whether multi-paneled comics or simple sketches. Although students might be hesitant about their art skills, it is not necessary for one to be a gifted artist to perform transmediation. Thispractice also does not require a technological familiarity with any external programs or applications as it is possible to drawon the whiteboards of many video conferencing apps, such as Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate. It would be easiest to drawon the whiteboard with a touch screen-enabled device, but it can also be done with a mouse. If the whiteboard seems toolimited for art that is more involved than a sketch, such as a 4-panel comic, there are websites like Pixton that only requireregistration with an account. Pixton is a comic and storyboard creator for educators, and it provides a variety of presetbackgrounds, characters, comic sound effects, and other art assets for students to choose from to put a comic together instead of drawing one.
What matters more than the aesthetics of student-generated art is the process of play and discovery that happens throughdrawing. Drawing comics, whether individually or collaboratively, is a particularly well-suited practice for exploration of atext or abstract ideas. For instance, in her essay, “Illustrating Praxis: Comic Composition, Narrative Rhetoric, and CriticalMultiliteracies,” Kathryn Comer explains how drawing and creating comics invited her students to consider how narrativesare constructed and how to make mindful, structural choices in revision. Furthermore, comics “rely on more than justlinguistic and visual modes of communication; they combine words and images with gestural, spatial, and even audiomodes into a truly multimodal experience” (Comer 76). This means that all students can participate in the creation of acomic, including students who are visually impaired or students who do not have the technological requirements to access ashared whiteboard. In a journal titled “Digital Transmediation and Revision”, Katherine Batchelor regards the playfulnessof drawing as a mode of inquiry, which “recognizes that deeper understanding can be obtained by students’ self-drivenunderstanding through multiple ways of knowing. Through these instances of inquiry, students are better able to inquire about themselves as writers, ways in which they want to think about revising, and more importantly, how they want to position themselves during semiotic acts of transmediating” (72). Therefore, writing and literature instructors can employ transmediation inmultiple contexts in online learning, such as:
- asking students to transmediate a complex literary or nonfiction passage into a digital whiteboard sketch andthen having them compare their sketches in
- Reflection prompt: How did they “see” the passage differently?
- asking students to collaboratively transmediate a passage into a multi-paneled This encourages students tonot only consider drawing the main “action” of the passage, but to also consider how their diverseinterpretations of the text inform the comic’s setting, background, characters (or lack of characters), facialexpressions, body language, captions, speech bubbles, onomatopoeic sound effects, and narrative pacing. Consequently, students are implicitly being tasked with discussing and deconstructing the text together.
- Reflection prompt: How did a writer’s rhetorical and literary choices impact their artistic choices?
- asking students to transmediate a creative writing piece into a drawing, comic, collage, presentation, or video.
- Reflection prompt: What did they observe about their writing and its narrative choices or structure through the process of transmediating it into another medium?
- asking students to transmediate a peer’s writing (whether it is creative writing, an analytical essay, or an argumentative essay, etc) into a drawing, comic, collage, infographic, wordmap, cluster word web, or presentation
- Reflection prompts for the student writer: What aspects of their writing/ideas were emphasized the most through transmediation by their peers? What does this reveal about how their audience “sees” theirwriting and main ideas? Did they “see” something that the original writer did not?
- Reflection prompts for the peer reviewer: how did your peer’s rhetorical, analytical, or structural choicesimpact your creative choices? What did they perceive as the writer’s main ideas or the main threads oftheir argument? What did they want to “see” more of in their peer’s writing?
Activities like these can facilitate online collaborative writing with the goal of deepening close reading and analysis. Moreover, asking students to collaborate on transmediating their assigned reading or their own writing creates a culture of mindful peer review and an enhanced approach to revision. Since writing is a means of discovery, transmediation fosters a sense of play and creativity within the writing process, as Batchelor demonstrates in her essay. Although Batchelor’s experience is in teaching middle school students, her proposals apply to college students, as well – especially first-year writing students. Many first-year writing students enter English 110 and English 130 with the assumption that “the first draft is the final draft”; they are therefore reluctant to engage in a slowed-down writing process that involves planning, outlining, drafting, and revising. Subsequently, transmediation (in both online learning and in-person learning) presents an opportunity to incorporate multimodality throughout the entire writing process, which can help to recontextualize revision as a playful and creative form of discovery rather than a tedious chore. Ultimately, transmediation invites students (and instructors!) to reimagine the processes that go into crafting writing and the active engagement necessary to motivate students to be readers and writers with agency.
Annotated Bibliography
- Batchelor, Katherine. “Digital Transmediation and Revision.” Voices from the Middle, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015,library.ncte.org/journals/VM/issues/v23-2/27621. Accessed 17 June 2022.
In this article, literacy professor Katherine Batchelor establishes how transmediation or “understanding from one signsystem and moving it into another in order to generate meaning” is a constructive process for revision (69).Transmediation allows students to “re-see” their writing, whether it is analytical or creative. The process oftransmediating a work of writing into another modality (comic, slideshow, animation, video, etc) invites deeper revisionand a sense of play as a mode of inquiry. Batchelor describes how a transmediation project worked out in a middle school class to create science fiction short stories, but the core practices of her project could easily work for college-level writingin an online setting. She even suggests online tools for multimodality, such as iMovie, Glogster, Pixton Comics, Animoto,GoAnimate, and Prezi. - Comer, Kathryn. “Illustrating Praxis: Comic Composition, Narrative Rhetoric, and Critical Multiliteracies.” Composition Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 75–104. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43501879. Accessed 17 June 2022.
In this article, composition professor Kathryn Comer investigates the affordances of composing comics and graphicmemoirs as pedagogical tools for “rhetorical experimentation and multimodal literacy development” (75). She argues howcomics present a unique opportunity to place several different modes of communication in conversation. Likewise, thecreation of comics asks students to carefully consider their rhetorical awareness of narrative and audience. She providesexamples of how comic composition succeeded in her graphic memoir class, which invited students to reflect on theirexperiences as comic readers and comic writers. Moreover, producing multimodal texts like comics required students totreat revision with more attention as they were more aware of how their narratives needed to be constructed for themedium. Comer reports how incorporating the comic assignment increased student attendance and participation andcreated more opportunities for workshops and peer revision. This source is both theoretically and pedagogically useful for instructors. The practice of composing comics can translate very well to online learning, where students can either usedigital whiteboard functions to draw comic panels (regardless of personal drawing ability) or upload photos with comic-like captions, as Comer shows. - Laksimi Morrow, Sakina. “Collaging Point of View.” Visible Pedagogy, vp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2020/01/27/collaging-point-of-view/. Accessed 17 June 2022.
In this blog post, urban education doctoral candidate Sakina Laksimi Morrow describes a collage project that took place inher pedagogy workshop. She explains how collages “[ask] for an interplay between intuition and thought – reconstructingnew meanings, finding other meanings from the raw material” (Laksimi Morrow). Multimedia digital collages can be incorporated into online learning for students to createmeaning from difficult texts or to discover new meanings within their own writing. - Losh, Elizabeth, et al. “Rethinking Revision.” Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2014, 217 – 244.
In this chapter, writing instructors Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander explore why revision is necessary in writingand how to do it effectively. Losh and Alexander address a common misconception about revision and explain itsdifferences from editing sentence-level errors. Their definition of revision is grounded in breaking down the word itself:“re-vision: it’s about seeing a composition anew, with fresh eyes – seeing your own work as if you were another reader.It’s about considering possibilities as well as problems” (219). To support this claim, Losh and Alexander providemethods of radical revision and examples of famous pieces of writing that were revised for the better. Since this chapteris a comic from a larger graphic guide, it serves as an example of a multimodal text in addition to presenting a necessarycase for the significance of revision and peer review in the writing process. It can be a valuable source for bothinstructors and students to navigate the conversation around essay revision and multimodal projects (like creating a comic).Losh and Alexander are essentially making a case for transmediation, similar to Katherine Batchelor. - Reimagining First-Year Writing at the University of Connecticut. U Conn, Sept 2018, express.adobe.com/page/bR1G4L0VYEufK/. Accessed 17 June 2022.
The First Year Writing program at the University of Connecticut spearheaded an initiative called Writing AcrossTechnology (WAT) in 2018. This department website outlines how WAT will inform the FYW program, primarily througha stronger emphasis on multimodality in writing classes. The goal of the WAT initiative is to “ask students to composemultimodally, exploring linguistic, aural, visual, gestural, and spatial modes of meaning-making.” To achieve thisgoal, the website provides a sketch of the kinds of meaning-making moves that should be scaffolded into FYW courses,including collecting and curating, engaging and entering a conversation, contextualizing, theorizing, and circulating. The site also shares a detailed list of learning objectives and resources for instructors such as a course planning tool and toolsfor technology and engagement. Instructors will benefit from this source’s concrete and accessible approach to multimodal learning. Multimodality can flourish in the online classroom where it can be implemented in all steps of thelearning and writing process. - Shaw, Gwen. “Triple-Entry Journals: Engagement and Reflexivity.” Visible Pedagogy, vp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2017/03/28/my-triple-entry-journal-assignment-engagement-and- reflexivity/. Accessed17 June 2022.
In this blog post, art history doctoral candidate Gwen Shaw describes an assignment she designed called the “triple entryjournal,” which asks students to sketch a work of art. After sketching, students are asked to freewrite formal analysis of the piece, paying particular attention to the artist’s choices, especially those that stood out to the students as they were sketching.Lastly, students reflect on the insights they developed through sketching and analyzing to derive meaning from the work of art. This activity can be completed online for composition assignments that require visual analysis or for close reading assignments that could ask students to sketch what is happening in a literary passage. - Teaching Multimodal Composition. Sweetland Center for Writing at U of Mich, lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/instructors/teaching-resources/teaching-multimodal-composition. html. Accessed 17 June 2022.
This guide from the University of Michigan’s Center for Writing outlines resources and pedagogical practices for teachingmultimodal composition. It provides a basic framework for structuring multimodal projects in the compositionclassroom and tangible advice for achieving pedagogical goals. The practices listed in this guide can serve instructors inan online class with their easily adaptable suggestions for producing multimodal texts.
