Week 4: Montage

As I was reading through the Palmeri selection for this week from the Remixing Composition:  A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy text, I was struck by his discussion of "blend[ing] images, words, and sounds in associative ways" (87).  I started thinking about implementing multimodality in the classroom as an art form - a process of combining multiple mediums to create a complete educational experience.

As an undergraduate student, I became very interested in art and started creating my own artwork.  I took a class during my senior year of college entitled "Narrative Collage."  This class focused on the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of the 1910s and 1920s and how artists were creating works that combined multiple mediums.  Art wasn't so straightforward anymore; it was becoming difficult to categorize something as just a painting or just a drawing or just a photograph.  Dada and Surrealism contributed to a combination of different forms and found objects in each individual work of art.  The art movements didn't seek to devalue traditional art forms like paintings and drawings, but rather sought to combine multiple forms so as to encourage audiences to think and interpret art in new and different ways.  Also, the world was in the midst of chaos brought on by war, so these works of art that implemented image, text, and more helped artists and viewers alike to cope with a tumultuous time in history.

Palmeri's discussion in Part 2 of Remixing Composition about implementing multimodality in the composition classroom is like a narrative collage.  Print/alphabetic text is not dead and I don't think any proponent of multimodal texts would advocate for that; rather, alphabetic text serves a new role in a classroom environment where technology is brought in alongside traditional writing.  When the two are brought together, one isn't devalued over the other.  They both work together to create something beautiful - a new educational experience where students are led to think and examine in new and exciting ways.

Palmeri writes, "A few compositionists of the early 1970s suggested that the electronic revolution necessitated a rethinking of the field's conventional privileging of linearity and originality in print texts, arguing instead that writing teachers should engage students in analyzing and/or producing participatory, associative texts that made meaning through juxtaposition, incorporated found images and words, and enabled audience interaction" (88).  Multimodal composing seeks to accomplish the same goals as works developed in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements.  As stated previously, alphabetic text still serves an important role in composition and art.  It seeks to give meaning to those works created through the use of multimodality.

After college, I went on obtain a graduate degree in English and creative writing.  My thesis for grad school was a narrative collage that told a story through the use of anatomical images, diagrams, and text (along with several other mediums).  I enjoyed this combination of materials in art so much that I went on to teach art courses at the college level after grad school.  Thinking about multimodality in terms of a work of art (that only gains more meaning the more that it is incorporated into it) makes multimodal composing seem less challenging and more like an opportunity to think about technology and academia in new and exciting ways.

Here's a few pages from my graduate thesis/narrative collage:

Palmeri claims that "we as compositionists [are] crafting new media texts that blend words, images, and sounds in associative ways" (89).  Palmeri later discusses a textbook called Montage that pushed the boundaries of traditional texts to become something more interactive for readers (101).  Multimodality, like narrative collage, works to push the boundaries of traditional text and create something new altogether.