More Real-World Multimodal Investigation

[Note: This message has been postdated so as to continue with the current conversation regarding multimodal pedagogy. The actual date of the post is December 8, 2006.]

Soon after speaking to Mrs. Hudson and Mr. Etheridge about their independent uses of multimodal presentations for classroom teaching (see Multimodal Examples), my colleague, mentor, and instructor, Dr. Cynthia Haynes, contacted me with a website that further investigates the real-world implementation of multimodal pedagogy. This website describes how researchers from the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Wilmington, the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, and Utah State University collaborated to compile a recent article and survey that investigate “how [post-secondary] instructors use multimodal composition practices in their writing classrooms and research.” Their research, including the detailed empirical data collected via the survey, was published online by Matt Bemer and is hosted by Texas Christian University.

This research is of particular interest to our discussion, as it gives us careful insight into the current state of the art, so to speak. By that, I mean that in considering the responses given by the 45 survey respondents, we can gain a glimpse of the current popularity and effectiveness of multimodal pedagogy.

What becomes clear after investigating the survey results is that multimodal teaching practices are being spread among teachers, who are taking the initiative to try these practices out in their own classrooms without much support from their institutions. Now, this isn’t to say that institutions are hesitant to support such teaching practices. On the contrary, it may suggest that this pedagogical structure is so new and innovative that institutions have not been allowed sufficient time to develop program committees or specific classroom guidelines as standards for practice. In the meantime, it seems that these institutions are doing whatever is economically feasible to provide these teachers with enough technological resources (most at the teachers’ requests) to facilitate such discussions.

I suspect that as more and more teachers are turned on to these teaching methodologies, it will become necessary for individual departments and specific programs to implement some type of comprehensive multimodal structure within their curricula. Doing so will encourage increased communication and broader learning for students throughout their college career, as opposed to just the classes whose teachers are technologically savvy enough to move forward in this field on their own. I would be interested to see the results of a comparative study that asks the same questions three, five, or even ten years from now.