Our educational system is deeply rooted within assessment and tied to this is the idea of essay writing. Essay writing in the traditional sense, is an important skill to have, but it is by no means, the only way in which the important ideas of an essay can be extracted and clearly identified to others. These traditional texts were more applicable before technology became such a fundamental part of how meaning is conveyed. Today, individuals need to have a deeper understanding of how all of these new types of texts integrate with one another to convey meanings.
Hughes and Tolley argue that we need to "help our students understand and experience how literature brings them to a deeper understanding in life, we need to find meaningful ways to engage them with it, ways that are also part of their new media world." I fully agree with this idea but I struggle on how to do this. The resources that schools have can be so limiting and doing some of this type of work requires certain tools in order to have it work successfully. Can the same learning be achieved in a classroom when these resources are limited? Does simply talking to students about these new medias actually engage them so that they are able to take something away from these discussions? Perhaps I question this because my educational philosopies are deeply rooted within experiential based learning.
Implementing visual essays in our curriculum seems like a very promising activity in allowing students alternative ways to demonstrate their understanding of a given topic. Some students struggle with their own 'voice' when it comes to committing ideas to paper, but excel when asked to voice their opinions in a verbal manner. A visual essay can provide these types of students with the perfect opportunity to explore these new ways of producing meaning.
Hughes and Tolley mention that they wished they had called these projects 'redesigned demonstrations of literacy' instead of visual essays, as the students had beyond creating something that was just visual. I question that if it were to be called something else, would it make a significant difference or not?
My hope after reading this article and reflecting upon the use of visual essays in the classroom, is that more teachers start to make activities like this part of their regular practice. Too often, we are consumed by the idea of assessment and covering everything in the curriculum. Yes, getting heavily involved in these concepts is important, but it is also important to engage the students in our classrooms who are not necessarily engaged using traditional texts. I have had first hand experience using multimodal texts in my practicum placement and I found that the students who usually did not do well, or even hand in work, were the most enthusiastic when provided an opportunity to work in this way. Why not allow students to engage in literacies that they enjoy?
Coming from a musical background, I am very fascinated to learn of the different musical choices that students make when working multimodally. When using music with lyrics, many times it is easy to see if students made a good choice or not with respect to their choice. My musical background allows me to assess if students had made good musical choices if they were to select music without lyrics. I am interested in knowing if teachers that come from little to no musical background find it hard to make this connection. Are they comfortable assessing a choice like this? Is it really fair that they can assess something like this if they do not necessarily have the skills to understand it, particularly if a student were to write a piece of music themselves to incorporate into a multimodal text. This is a very debatable topic and it would be interesting to hear people's perspectives on it.
As educators, we are going to have to continue to challenge our own thoughts on what it means to be literate. We must begin to incorporate or continue to add these new literacies to our own teaching practices so that the material we teach becomes more applicable to the world in which our students are living in. As technology evolves our teaching practices must shift with it.
Huges, J & Tolley, S. (2010). Engaging Students Through New Literacies: The Good, Bad and Curriculum of Visual Essays. English Education, 44(1).
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You ask, "Does simply talking to students about these new medias actually engage them so that they are able to take something away from these discussions?" I would respond that simply talking about it will not inspire learning. Selber (2000) talks about the necessity of students being 1) Questioners of technology, 2) Users of technology and 3) Producers of technology. We need to engage students in all three categories if they are to become "digerate" or digitally literate.
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