RM Winter 2017

Using Digital Tools to Convey Multimodal Arguments

By Emily Howell, Iowa State University

action in online environments. Gladwell (2010) argued that Twitter and other social media technologies will not be the tools of the next generation as they lack the leadership, organization, and close personal ties that characterize successful social protests, such as those of the Civil Rights Movement. Regarding students’ use of technological tools, research is beginning to debunk the term digital native introduced by Prensky (2001) as a myth and question whether or not students have the digital literacies necessary to support academic learning, such as argumentative writing (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008). Digital Tools, Multiliteracies, and Writing Instruction Adolescents today live in a world in which they are surrounded by technology as they are exposed to media an average of 7.5 hours a day, seven days a week (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010). Their engagement in these activities and the need to integrate these activities meaningfully into schooling has been noted (Alvermann, 2008). Professional organizations for literacy have issued position statements on new literacies that call for teaching practices to include teaching students to assess information found online, create with multimedia, understand multimodality, and be given the strategies required to practice literacy online (International Reading Association [IRA], 2009; National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE], 2005, 2008). However, in this digital era in which authorship is ubiquitous and reaches an immediate, vast audience (Yancey, 2009), how are students being instructed to use technology to develop writing that is not merely participatory as Gladwell (2010) implied, but is reflective and influential? The NLG (1996) saw the need to teach students in an increasingly technological and globalized world an expanded concept of literacy, which they coined multiliteracies . Whereas traditional schooling attempted to homogenize citizens to prepare them with the same skills and knowledge to be ready for the economic market, the intent of multiliteracies is to celebrate differences to teach students to use their particular skills and interests to be active, engaged citizens capable of designing “their social future” (NLG, 1996, pp. 60, 72). The NLG focused on designing an expanded concept of text across multiple modes of representation- linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodal. Of these modes, the multimodal was considered the most significant (NLG, 1996), especially today as the Internet and other Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) demand integrating modes to convey and comprehend meaning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). However, the NLG created a perspective that still has limited classroom application (Graham & Benson, 2010; Sewell & Denton, 2011). In addition to a dearth of publications to help integrate multiliteracies in classrooms, teachers also face an accountability

ABSTRACT—This article describes the digital, multimodal tools used throughout the writing process to help students design multimodal arguments. The author discusses the need for integrating multimodal arguments in classrooms based upon the New London Group’s multiliteracies perspective. Reflecting upon a formative experiment in high-school English classrooms, the author describes how students used these tools to argue for a chosen social cause, the implementation of these tools at each stage of the writing process, the purpose for using each tool, and the affordances and disadvantages of such tool use. Multimodal composing is “the conscious manipulation of the interaction among various sensory experiences-visual, textual, verbal, tactile, and aural-used in the processes of producing and reading texts” (Bowen &Whithaus, 2013, p. 7). The New London Group (1996) highlighted the concept of multimodality in their perspective of multiliteracies. Although the New London Group (NLG) and others described the potential and necessity for students understanding the expanding concept of text and literacy that digital technologies afford to enact social change, some doubt whether or not adolescents will really achieve such change in these digital spaces (Gladwell, 2010). In a formative experiment in two high-school English III classrooms over an eight-week period, I worked with a teacher to enact an intervention using digital, multimodal tools with a process writing approach to help students write better arguments, both traditional and online. During this intervention we helped students design multimodal arguments for a cause important to them and publish this argument as a Public Service Announcement (PSA). I describe here the digital, multimodal tools used in this intervention with the hope of giving teachers practical classroom application of the multiliteracies framework. Writing, Digital Tools, and Social Change Writing is a technology that has long held the potential to impact social change. For example, Martin Luther revolutionized the church by using the printing press to disseminate his theses (Howard, 2010). Today, technology, such as social media, is a tool that writers deliberately utilize to publish their social arguments. For example, the United States government attempted to provoke an uprising of the Cuban people not through diplomacy or military action, but through the spread of social media (Butler, Gillum, & Arce, 2014). The United States Agency for International Development created a Cuban form of Twitter called ZunZuneo in what some considered an attempt to undermine the communist government in Cuba. Shirky (2008) claimed that changes in communication tools led to changes in how society functions and maintains itself. However, some doubt the power of social

Reading Matters Technology Matters

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