Alternative Modes of Communication

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Faymonville's article challenging monolingualism in the classroom piqued my interest as my class currently works on their multimodal project.

While I agree that introducing students to a wider range of languages is important (as is supporting those who come from languages and cultures outside of our own), there's a pretty large practical concern. It's easy for the author, a native German speaker, to disrupt a monolingual English situation in their teaching. Having students from other cultures and languages in our classroom also helps disrupt those structures (not that we should force responsibility onto these students, but I think their very presence can make our predominantly Hoosier classrooms wonderfully uncomfortable). I have a much harder time doing that disruption as a white dude from Ohio.

My question is, then, do our multimodal assignments do enough work to ask the kinds of questions Faymonville wants us to ask? If they aren't currently, can they?

One of the reasons I think they can is how Faymonville frames monolingualism not with grammar, but societal expectations. In that sense, the traditional academic expression of the essay is the mode in which our monolingual students converse. By making them do real multimodal work, I wonder if we can destabilize at least some of our students' assumptions about language.

They just submitted their assignments, so I don't yet know how going multimodal has affected my students. For those of your who have already completed that unit, how has that experience affected your students w/r/t language?

Comments

  1. Cassia StultsApril 24, 2020 at 5:05 PM

    Hey Lucas,

    (Everyone should get at least one comment).

    I think this brings up some really intriguing possibilities. I like the idea of using a multimodal project to truly destabilize those monolingual forms of communications (especially academic communication). I think this is especially true when the multimodal project is something that does not allow traditional words. Pushing for things like images, sounds and not speech as communication, even something like interpretive dance as a legitimate form of composition allow students (and us) to explore what it really means to communicate with each other. After all, 90% of communication is non-verbal, not to mention all the ways that material culture can communicate to us (something that I think multimodal composition could demonstrate).

    My own students are currently finishing up their own multimodal assignments. While I gave them more leeway given the situation to compose a more "traditional" paper if they wanted, many of them are still doing interesting things that push the boundaries of both monolingual communication and what would traditionally be considered "researched writing" (they are using research collected from their Major Research Project to write a fictional story about their topic). I'll have to let you all know how that turns out, but I'm excited to read what they create!

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