In the context of the manifesto, text can be read in two ways. First, it refers to the printed word, the dominant means of representing academic knowledge since the fifteenth-century invention of the Gutenberg press (Ong 1960). In this sense, it can equally refer to the meticulously typeset words of a monograph, the rapidly assembled smartphone message, or a paragraph copied from one screen-mediated document and then pasted into another. From a multimodal perspective, however, text has tended to be used in a broader way to denote a representational genre: written or printed text but also painting, photograph, poetry recital, music performance, and so on. Genre, according to Bateman (2008), provides a way of framing discussion around multimodality and of theorizing what a multimodal document can be. As multimodality has emerged as a discrete field of research alongside and often closely tied to advances in digital technology (Kress and Selander 2012), a considerable amount of its interest has concerned the construction and interpretation of different genres of digital texts. A central proposition of multimodal research is that the proliferation of digital devices and platforms across education and society has made it increasingly easy to communicate across a range of semiotic resources—that is, materials and actions that carry meaning.
Combining both interpretations of text, the Manifesto for Teaching Online argues that digital education—and digital society generally—offers us new ways of communicating and consuming academic knowledge. The essay, textbook, and journal article, whether presented on paper or screen, remain central, yet the repertoire of resources we can plausibly use to share scholarship has broadened. Within digital learning environments, teachers and students can readily draw on the representational possibilities of games, visualizations, videos, podcasts, animations, illustrations, and more (Bayne and Ross 2013; Bezemer and Kress 2008; McKenna and Hughes 2013). This is not to suggest that academic knowledge has previously been limited to the power of words: anatomical drawings, architectural models, data visualizations, and a multitude of artifacts and practices within the creative arts illustrate a deep-rooted tradition of multimodal meaning-making across the disciplines. At the same time, while assignments constructed in digital form support diverse media that cannot be deployed in conventional printed forms, these new media spaces can just as easily replicate the linearity, structure, and other conventions of the word-processed essay (McKenna and McAvinia 2011). Nevertheless, across a range of academic contexts (and particularly in settings that have traditionally privileged written text) the digital form presents new opportunities for constructing and sharing academic knowledge in ways beyond words.
The case for placing greater emphasis on multimodality within teaching has been made in a number of ways across the literature, including the need for pedagogy to take advantage of emergent digital technologies (Matthewman and Triggs 2004) and to acknowledge the evolving literacy practices of students (Krause 2013). Multimodal pedagogy is also seen to align with our increasingly visual society (Bickmore and Christiansen 2010) and better equip learners with the meaning-making practices demanded by employment (Kimber and Wyatt-Smith 2010) and the global economy (Johnson and Kress 2003). However, rather than looking to the way that digital multimodal education can deterministically align to the pressures of the knowledge economy critiqued in part I of this book, in this manifesto statement, we are interested in how a multimodal slant within teaching can play a critical role, offering new, highly creative ways for students to represent what they know for the purposes of assessment, sharing, and evaluation. Allowing, or even requiring, students to look to genres and modes beyond text prompts them to think both critically and creatively about what it means to represent academic knowledge.
Within our master’s in digital education program, we use this approach to ask students to challenge and question some of the orthodoxies of linearity, authorship, and mode while also offering them a wide digital palette with which they can experiment with radically divergent ways of building an academic argument. We ask them to address the implications of the visual turn in the wider culture for academic ways of knowing by experimenting with technologies that place a greater emphasis on visuality (Carpenter 2014; McKenna and McAvinia 2011), exploring digital alternatives to the dominance of language-as-text in its different forms. This does not mean that the image will necessarily entirely displace words on page or screen but instead that, as teachers, we can be open to alternative and other representational possibilities. Taking the position that all communicational acts are multimodal to some degree, our manifesto statement should be seen not as a call to exclude printed text, but rather to better acknowledge and accommodate the representation of academic knowledge in ways beyond words.
Perhaps understandably in light of its historical commitment to the printed word, much of the critical discussion around multimodality and pedagogy in the literature is set within the humanities and disciplines, which have tended to privilege written language. In particular, there has been an interest in assessment approaches that offer greater representational flexibility than is possible with the traditional essay—for instance, through the creation of animations (Gunsberg 2015), video games (Colby 2014), and visually oriented artifacts such as posters (Archer 2011). Compared to the essay genre with its deep-rooted textual orthodoxies of linearity, structure, and form, the digital environment offers students greater scope to experiment with alternative ways of building an academic argument. It also, of course, carries potential disadvantages: the removal of well-established constraints such as tightness of word count, elegance of exposition, and use of existing literature brings with them a loss of established frameworks for assessing quality, making multimodal assignments often harder to assess and grade.
The possibility exists that teachers might be more enthusiastic about embracing multimodality than students, who may be reluctant to experiment with the “dubious” and “disposable” digital form (Bayne 2006, 21), particularly in the high-stakes assessment setting where the tried-and-trusted essay approach might seem considerably less risky (Lea and Jones 2011). As discussed in part I, we should also remain alert to the way that educational activity is assembled by many agents (Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011), including the teacher and student but extending beyond. Therefore, where research around multimodal pedagogy usefully highlights some of the representational and interpretive challenges that exist around the creation of academic content, sociomateriality enables us to better understand how a piece of digital scholarship can be shaped by learning outcomes and the learner’s interests, but also through the availability and capability of technologies, institutional decisions around procurement and benchmarking, as well as by resources of time, money, and support.
We argue that with some groups of students, allowing the wide, creative scope of the multimodal, digital assignment produces work of high quality and high value. To take such an approach requires us as teachers to develop—for ourselves and for our students—new ways of approaching the task of assessment and evaluation that move us beyond the long-established textual orthodoxies and into challenging new territory. Text has been troubled: many modes matter in representing academic knowledge.