Using Multimodal Tools to Communicate and Create Across Form & Genre
Exploring ways students can take up forms and genres beyond literary interpretation to communicate with authentic audiences
This is a continuation of my series examining what I regard as the three key practices of English teaching: interpretation, representation, and communication. Each post in the series is meant to stand on its own, but if you want to get the big picture, check out my “Overcoming the Theory/Practice Divide In English” post. It’s been a fun ride, but this is my last post in the series. This topic will continue to be a recurring theme on Becoming Literary, but I hope to start including some other types of posts beginning next week.
Note: As always, student examples are shared with permission. Receiving student consent to share their work is a key part of ensuring educators share their practice in ethical ways that respect student privacy.
Thus far, my posts have mostly focused on how I invite my students to analyze literary works and produce interpretations using both traditional forms of writing as well as various digital tools. While that is foundational to my teaching, there are plenty of other projects and practices I’m passionate about. In a follow-up from last week, I wanted to share a few project examples to illustrate how I weave other aspects of English studies into my curriculum and invite students to produce a wide array of aesthetic forms.
Using Short Film to Create & Critique
In addition to spending a lot of time supporting students' ability to read and analyze works of literature, I also try to include at least one unit in every course I teach that emphasizes the interpretation and creation of film and/or dramatic productions. In my experience, students enjoy learning to decipher the codes and conventions of plays and movies, allowing them to develop a richer appreciation of the content they consume every day. Whenever I introduce mise-en-scene, I start with this phenomenal video from The Media Insider alongside this sketchnote template. Providing students with what I’ve dubbed a “minimum viable metalanguage” goes a long way in elevating their ability to notice and discuss the use of particular aesthetic tools.
This is especially empowering when paired with literary and critical theory, considering it allows for a more sophisticated understanding of the interplay between form and content. If that interests you, I highly recommend Bloomsbury’s Film Theory in Practice book series. It’s a great series featuring some of my favorite literary/film scholars, including Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, and Ryan Engley (I also highly recommend Todd’s and Ryan’s phenomenal podcast Why Theory). The books might be a little dense for students to tackle on their own, but with the appropriate scaffolding, they can provide some useful language, practices, and frameworks you can share with learners wanting to conduct a more sophisticated analysis of film.
In the past, I’ve had students use the practices I’ve been detailing in my series to form an interpretation to publish on our class blog, submit to a class magazine, or remix into a short-form video. However, I’ve also had them apply their understanding more directly and film their own scenes. For instance, consider this interdisciplinary Humanities project that invited our 10th graders to do their best Arthur Miller impression and use dramatic allegory as a form of social commentary and critique.
I’d love to post a full version of students’ videos, but for privacy reasons, I’ll just share this one clip since their faces aren’t shown directly. Notice how this group employed multiple camera angles, music, costuming, and stage direction to suggest this character is a rather careless and immature teen whose attention is typically on things other than school.
Considering this is an English class and not a drama class, I’m not really concerned about their acting, but I am paying close attention to the ways students take up particular aesthetic tools and conventions from the world of film while producing their projects. To ensure these video projects are treated as authentic opportunities to demonstrate understanding of the form, tell compelling stories, and convey meaningful themes rather than empty fun in between “more serious” work, learners submit Design Reflections where they provide a rationale for their use of particular aesthetic tools and design choices.
Using Documentaries to Communicate & Critique
Beyond the world of narrative, I have also asked my classes to use digital and multimodal tools to remix position papers into documentary-style videos. This is often done to encourage students to explore the affordances and constraints of different modes of communication. For instance, how can a written position paper more clearly convey actionable steps for an audience seeking to fix a problem? Conversely, how can a documentary leverage sound and music to ramp up the affective responses of its audience in ways writing never could? What are the differences between a script for a documentary and a white paper for a think tank? Who are the assumed or implied audiences of these different forms? What aesthetic tools might one use to account for that?
Consider this example from our 10th-grade American Studies culminating project. After spending the year exploring a mix of America’s literary tradition and contemporary popular culture, students embark on a month-long research project where they interrogate the American Dream based on our current legal, housing, and education systems.
For more information on how the documentary project is laid out, check out the overview sheet shared with the 10th graders who chose to produce a documentary once they begin Phase 3 of the project. To ensure students had a solid understanding of the design choices available to them, I had them view a few similar documentaries I curated and had them complete the Design Analysis Protocol I detailed last week. See what I mean about how versatile of a tool that can be? Check out this student example from last year.
I was blown away by the depth and nuance in this group’s video. They not only demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of their topic from a variety of perspectives and vantage points, but their use of existing media, images, and text resulted in an incredibly polished and aesthetically functional documentary. Similar to my short film project, students had to complete another design reflection project to explain their design choices and use of aesthetic tools.
Using Art to Create & Respond
Considering the large language model induced moral panic sweeping through education right now, I understand educators’ impulse to switch to in-class writing and blue-book assessment, even if I disagree with it. I also understand the groans and eye rolls that often emerge from folks who have seen their fair share of shoebox dioramas and ceiling mobiles masquerading as meaningful English projects. My friend Dan Ryder, who is a big believer in critical creativity, refers to these low-effort arts and crafts assignments as “dumpster projects.” I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way!
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dewey, Rosenblatt, and Maxine Greene recently due to some post-dissertation articles I’m writing. I’ll be sharing more about their work and my research soon, but for now, I’ll just say that all three of these brilliant educational scholars had a lot to say about the power and importance of rich, aesthetic experiences with texts (broadly conceived). If anything, the rise of ChatGPT and LLMs has made me want to take a cue from this trio and provide opportunities for students to log off, engage with aesthetic objects, and create something to convey their responses, feelings, and experiences with them—not just their interpretations of them. Consider this example from my American Literature class last year.
As you can see, the purpose of this project was more affective than analytical in nature, but there was still some evaluation and interpretation at play. The important thing was that students were invited to share their personal philosophy of freedom in whatever modality they felt best allowed them to share their beliefs with me and their classmates. I was fascinated by how much of my class abandoned their digital safety blankets and decided to paint, paste, and produce something tactile.
Wrap Up
These projects demonstrate that multimodal composition isn't just about giving students a break from traditional essays or finding creative ways to prevent them from hacking assignments with LLMs. When thoughtfully designed, these projects can deepen learners' understanding of both form and content while developing their capacity for creative and critical expression across a range of aesthetic forms. My goal with this work is to provide students with a wider array of aesthetic tools and semiotic resources they can use to respond to, interpret, or create texts. To my mind, that’s what “becoming literary” is really about.
Whether my classes are crafting short films that explore historical allegories, producing documentaries that critique social issues, or creating artistic responses to literature, they're engaging in sophisticated meaning-making that often exceeds what's possible in traditional written assignments alone. That’s not to say that writing assignments are not important, even foundational, to the discipline. It is to say that educators who see writing as the only viable vehicle for communication are missing out on the countless affordances offered by multimodal composing. As Jody Shipka claims, the integration of these modes into our teaching expands what’s possible in our classrooms and moves us toward a composition made whole.
What makes these projects particularly powerful is how they combine multiple forms of literacy: literary, visual, digital, cultural, and critical. Students aren't just learning how to use a camera or edit a video—they're learning how aesthetic choices shape meaning, how different mediums enable different kinds of expression, and how to thoughtfully engage with complex ideas across multiple modes of communication. It isn’t about slick 21st-century skills or whizz-bang apps—it’s about expanding students’ repertoire for meaning-making.
With that in mind, I hope these kinds of projects serve as a reminder that technology and tradition don't have to be at odds. Instead, they can work together to create richer, more engaging learning experiences that honor both the timeless goals of English education and the evolving ways we create and communicate meaning in the modern world. Our students deserve learning ecologies that can simultaneously draw from tradition while being oriented toward the future. In fact—so do we!
I'd love to hear about the multimodal projects you're trying in your classroom. What's working? What challenges have you encountered? How do you balance traditional and multimodal composition in your teaching? Drop a comment below or reach out on BlueSky—I'm always excited to learn from other educators' experiences!