English/Language Arts Disciplinary Literacy and Multimodal Composition

 

English/Language Arts Disciplinary Literacy and Multimodal Composition

             Before this semester, I had never heard of disciplinary literacy. Being a secondary English/language arts teacher, I knew my discipline and followed the standards I was supposed to teach. However, now I realize that I was missing so many opportunities to make ELA learning authentic to the world around my students and their futures. Trying to avoid questions like "what are we going to use this for?" or "why do we need to learn this?" has driven me to find answers for creating authentic learning experiences for my students, especially through relevant multimodal composition projects that can be shared with real-world audiences.

 Disciplinary literacy is not only the specific skills needed to read and write within specific subjects but also teaching students how they can utilize these skills outside of school. English/language arts gives foundational skills in reading and writing that students can use in other subjects and the real world. However, it is difficult at times to make these connections relevant to students. The standards are just a starting point and should not be the only thing we focus on teaching students; there are many more aspects to disciplinary literacy that can help students see how to use English/language arts in the world around them. 

The Planning Elementary Digitally Supported Disciplinary Literacy (PEDDL) Framework (Colwell, Hutchinson, & Woodward, 2020) encompasses an array of aspects that need to be included when planning to incorporate successful disciplinary literacy in any subject. Colwell, Hutchinson, & Woodward (2020) list and explain the six phases:

1. Identifying appropriate disciplinary literacy practices (standards and objectives)

2. Framing disciplinary literacy (essential information and questions)

3. Selecting multimodal texts for disciplinary literacy (digital and multimodal texts)

4. Assessing disciplinary literacy with a variety of tools (assessments and a variety of tools to assess understanding)

5. Digitally supporting disciplinary literacy instruction (digital tools being used to deepen knowledge and create artifacts showing knowledge)

6. Reflecting to reach all learners (reflecting on how well the instruction reached all learners’ social, cultural, linguistic, and personal backgrounds) (Table 2.1, p. 21). 

While multimodal composition projects should follow all six steps, the focus of this blog entry will be steps 4 & 5 to show multimodal composition as an authentic assessment tool. Assessments should not be limited to traditional modes of communicating knowledge, such as written research papers. ELA should prepare students in a variety of modes of communication to be prepared for the globalized world. When describing step 4 of discipline assessments, the authors state “For example, performance tasks may include culminating assessments such as drafting a response to a government official describing a student’s position on a current topic” ((Colwell, Hutchinson, & Woodward, 2020, p. 30). Taking this example, I could change my traditional argumentative essay assessment and utilize something similar to the authors’ suggestion to an authentic real-world context of taking a position on a topic they are passionate about and giving a real-world audience, such as a local legislator or organization. They can choose their own path of multimodal composition for the assessment, which would lead to phase 5 of digitally supporting their learning. Teaching students how to show understanding using digital tools is very important because giving them a wide range of digital tools and being taught how to use them will allow students to choose tools that can help them reach their final goals. Tools could be categorized by the different modes of communication: aural (podcasts), gestural (recording a play using both verbal and nonverbal communication showing feelings about the issue), visuals (a digital poster with images), linguistic (recording an oral presentation), and spatial (a student-created blog or website). Digital tools allow students to choose which modes they want to communicate their learning. 

Here are a few options for different digital tools students can use to show learning: 

Website option: Google Sites 

  

Digital poster option: Piktochart. Podcast option:

        Multimodal composition allows students to practice disciplinary literacy in ways that can reach authentic audiences. Instead of only having students writing traditional essays fitting one format, teachers can have students produce multimodal work that can be published in ways much easier than traditional essays. This is an important aspect of ELA literacy; while we are not responsible for teaching students how to write specifically to each subject, good writing and communication skills are foundational in ELA and allow students to adapt them to the variety of audiences they face. ELA writing standards discuss the importance of writing adapting to different purposes and audiences. However, I have been weak in the area of having my students write for purposes other than “narrative”, “informative”, and “argumentative” and sharing to an audience much larger and diverse than myself. Peter Smagorinsky (2015), Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia Athens, states “What ultimately matters, then, is that writers develop communicative competence: the ability described by Hymes (1966) that broadly refers to the knowledge of how to adjust one's speech (or writing) to suit the occasion, requiring knowledge of more than just a single "standard" version of English” (143).  Students need to be able to take their understanding and show it outside of the classroom where communication is oftentimes quite different than what they will encounter outside of academics. Students should be able to take what they learn in my ELA classroom and know they can go out and solve real-world issues with the skills we learn. 

          While each discipline has its own unique literacy skills needed to be successful, students can still greatly benefit from utilizing disciplinary literacy skills learned across multiple subjects. Jane Gilrain (2015) describes how she taught poetry and genre study alongside art and theatre art professionals.  Students created multimodal projects of poetry and art murals while learning how to perform and evaluate performances. Not only were students able to build specific literacy in ELA, such as interpreting poetry like The Odyssey, but also made real-life connections to what they were reading and writing; she states, “...Empathizing with the tragic hero greatly empowered these children...poetry became a lifeline” (341). Her students gained real-life skills of self-expression because she was willing to go deeper than standards and tests to give her students authentic learning experiences. Another article researched cross-discipline study between science and English/language arts that brought in experts from multiple fields (biology, film and game designers, and medical professionals) to help students create a group multimodal composition of a sci-fi narrative using plot structure skills; students were given authentic roles of scientist, writer, designer, engineer, and more to use what the field experts and teachers taught along with their research to include in their project (Smith, Shen, Castek, & Manderino, 2017). I found great ideas from this article to make the discipline study of narrative elements much more authentic for students and allowing ELA discipline experts, such as local authors, to come in and discuss how these skills can be used in the real world. 

Oftentimes ELA is seen as the discipline where students just read fictional stories or write essays, but what we teach is important and can make a difference in students’ lives and futures. Writing can be used as an outlet that helps students understand the world around them, especially when we allow this writing to take place within the modes of communication they see in their everyday lives.

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