An Investigation of Digital Multimodal Instruction: Writing Instructors Teaching English and English Language Learners

Abstract

Digital multimodal projects (DMPs) are both common and popular. Adolescents and young adults compose digitally and multimodally in their daily lives, and digital multimodal composition projects are incorporated in K-12 (Smith, 2017, 2018) and university settings (Balaman, 2018; Dzekoe, 2017), including writing programs (Blakely, 2016; Ericsson et al., 2016). This study addresses the following research questions: How do university writing instructors plan, enact, and reflect on multimodal projects they assign in their courses? What are writing program instructors’ perspectives on planning and enacting digital multimodal composing projects? The setting for this study was the writing program at the University of Arizona. Six instructors were purposely selected from parallel courses with the same course goals. All instructors planned to enact at least one DMP, the department mandated portfolio DMP, and four instructors had additional DMPs in their courses. Data sources were three interviews (initial, process, and final), observations of teaching, and instructional materials. Analysis procedures included an inductive thematic analysis (Saldana, 2011) of the interviews and video logs and a deductive topic analysis (Bingham & Witkowsky, 2021) of the instructional materials. The findings from these analyses were used to develop a case study of each instructor (Yin, 2003). The cases were compared using Stake’s (2006) comparative case analysis. Emerging findings addressed how instructors planned, enacted, and reflected on their teaching of writing courses with DMPs, and their perspectives on planning and enacting DMPs. Two themes related to planning emerged: a) an emphasis on procedures and the course calendar and b) the role of professional collaboration during planning. Two themes emerged regarding instructor’s enactment of their DMPs: a) instructors taught traditional composition development with some instruction helping to prepare students for DMPs and b) instructors strove for coherence across the course(s) they taught. Instructors used both designed and interactional scaffolds (Pacheco et al., 2021). Themes related to instructor’s reflections included the following: using multimodality; improving plans for teaching the DMP; improving scaffolds to teach visual layout; and better integrating DMPs into their courses. Finally, five themes emerged to answer the second research question: instructors’ perspectives 1) on planning; 2) of DMP affordances; 3) of DMP constraints; 4) on ELL instruction, and 5) on success of DMPs with ideas for improvement. Findings revealed several implications for instruction, programs, and theory and research. First, university writing programs and instructors need to develop understandings of new literacies to plan, enact, and assess DMPs. A print-centric and English-centric instructional foci creates challenges for including DMPs in courses (Dagenais et. al., 2017) and for implementing transformative pedagogies (Smith et al., 2021). Capitalizing on the affordances of multiple modes enables effective design and use of scaffolds and enhances evaluation of student DMPs. Instructors and programs need to understand literacy modes other than writing. Second, this study suggests the importance of course coherence. A coherent course includes connections between course assignments, projects, and DMPs and using scaffolds to teach DMPs. Third, the process of reflection was beneficial to instructors: it helped instructors perceive the course and DMP goals more clearly and to think about improvements to planning, enacting, and scaffolding DMPs. Fourth, although the DMP affordances instructors identified align with the literature, an additional affordance, the multidimensionality of the learning process, emerged. Fifth, instructors need support to address the DMP technology challenges they encountered. This support could include collaborating with other instructors and colleagues on DMPs, especially planning and enacting DMPs with ELL students. Finally, instructors need guidance to choose, use, and scaffold DMP tools. Further research is needed to inform the literature about using DMPs in a writing program.