Miller and McVee (learning, instruction, and literacy studies, U. of Buffalo, State U. of New York) encourage teachers and other educators to rethink literacy and literate practices and engage in new literacies, which go beyond linguistic texts and draw on multiple modes. They present nine cases from US education scholars who describe the composition of multimodal texts and the opportunities and limitations this creates in elementary through graduate settings. Examples are discussed such as the responses of preservice and inservice teachers when exploring digital technologies and literacies in a teacher education course; the use of digital videos, including multimodal composing in a music video; hyper-text slides; and a multimodal poetry project. They illustrate six components of this practice: developing a new literacies stance, initiating a social space for mediation of collaborative composing, co-constructing a sense of purpose for students' multimodal composing, drawing on and encouraging students to draw on their identities and lifeworlds, making design elements explicit as meaning-making tools, and supporting embodied learning through students' translating symbolically with modes. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Taking a close look at multimodal composing as an essential new literacy in schools, this volume draws from contextualized case studies across educational contexts to provide detailed portraits of teachers and students at work in classrooms. Authors elaborate key issues in transforming classrooms with student multimodal composing, including changes in teachers, teaching, and learning. Six action principles for teaching for embodied learning through multimodal composing are presented and explained.
The rich illustrations of practice encourage both discussion of practical challenges and dilemmas and conceptualization beyond the specific cases. Historically, issues in New Literacy Studies, multimodality, new literacies, and multiliteracies have primarily been addressed theoretically, promoting a shift in educators’ thinking about what constitutes literacy teaching and learning in a world no longer bounded by print text only. Such theory is necessary (and beneficial for re-thinking practices). What Multimodal Composing in Classrooms contributes to this scholarship are the voices of teachers and students talking about changing practices in real classrooms.
