During the early 18th century education in America, based on Western traditions, concentrated on orality (Selfe 620). According to David Russell the value that society then, placed on oral, face-to-face encounters was tied to the cultural values, power and “practices of privileged families” that thought of orality as a sign of the educated class (qtd. in Selfe 620).
However, during the mid and late 19th century, a shift to industrial manufacturing, scientific discovery and international trade sparked a change in how universities taught and what kind of curriculum they had to prepare the professionals needed in these growing areas. Selfe notes that this period marked the emergence of many English departments. It was also during this period that orality as a form of multimodal composition started to lose ground. As more classes focused on writing only and speech and communication based instruction practically disappeared from English departments, aurality (speech, sound, image) took a back seat in academia, though it never completely vanished.
The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st marked a different period for multimodal composing. Although still neglected in the classrooms “new software and hardware applications…have provided increasing numbers of people the means of producing and distributing communications that take advantage of multiple expressive modalities” (Selfe 637). Television channels, websites, newspapers, advertisement, companies and people in general were using not only print but also audio, images, video and other tools to enrich the texts they were producing. The advantage of these technologies is that they “transformed the era of mass popular culture into one of participatory popular culture where boundaries have been blurred between media and between producer and audience” (Williams 6). People are not only consumers; they are also producers of content and participant in the content others produce. Most important for composition teachers, students are highly engaged in writing this multimodal content outside of the classrooms. Scholars that support the inclusion of multimodal composing into the classrooms argue that students are moving beyond the passive use of the web to retrieve information “to be active communicators… involving both reading and composing on the web, both understanding and producing multimodal digital texts” (Doering, Beach and O’Brien 41).
Advocating for a change in instruction a shift, though still shy, can be observed. English composition teachers are experimenting with multimodality encouraging students to use Web 2.0 tools (social networking site, blogs, wikis), assigning multimodal compositions that incorporate elements to enrich text and using the tools themselves to supplement classroom lessons. As Diana George also adds, current discussions have only “tapped the surface of possibilities” of the role of multimodal communication in compositions classes (qtd. in Shipka 278).
Works Cited
Doering, Aaron, Richard Beach and David O’Brien. “Infusing Multimodal Tools and Digital Literacies in an English Education Program.” English Education. 40.1 (Oct. 2007):41-60. JSTOR. Web. 19 December 2011.
Selfe, Cynthia L. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” CCC. 60:4 (June 2009):616-663.
Shipka, Jody. “A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing.” College Composition and Communication. 57.2 (Dec. 2005):277-306. JSTOR. Web. 19 December 2011.
Williams, Bronwyn T. Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture and Reading and Writing Online. New York: Peter Lang. 2009. Print.
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