I think multimodal pedagogies are extremely valuable in our technophilic society. But I also think we have to keep in mind that students’ technological prowess or access to technology resources may either exceed or be vastly less than we might guess. Students are fluent in texting platforms and social media platforms, but I (re)learned while teaching remotely earlier in the pandemic that they don’t always know how to enable sharing or editing access in a Google doc, for instance, or that getting students set up on Open Lab can be an ordeal. (I now use Blackboard for my classes simply because students have default accounts on the platform, and I’m reluctant to bring additional platforms into my in-person teaching after semesters teaching remotely using combinations of Zoom, Open Lab, Blackboard, and Google Docs.)

While I myself have some abilities in word processing and data management platforms, I don’t feel well suited to teaching the use of platforms beyond the library’s research databases and word-processing software–much though I try to encourage students to create work in other platforms if they have outside knowledge. I have to admit, though, that I feel stymied by instances like a student last semester who made a video about skateboarding but I think his friend who helped film did most of the editing (the friend owned the camera). But maybe this is fine? This article’s suggestion that teachers hesitant about multimodal writing could let students choose modalities for their written work rather than teaching students how to use those modalities was encouraging to me, though–that I can definitely do.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about developing an assignment (maybe a version of 1121’s Unit 2 or 1101’s Units 2 and 3) where students research the neighborhood where they live or their family history (or maybe the neighborhood where they were born? but that could make site visits harder). I think it would be really cool to incorporate multimodality in such a project–urging students to photograph and film neighborhood fixtures, local denizens, record audio or video of interviews, film what they see as they walk down the block. In their tech surveys this semester, all my students (or at least those who completed the survey…) said they have smartphones, so they could film on their phones to keep the need for material resources down.