Alicia Freeman and Multimodality: Here’s a Video of My Cat for Some Reason

Behold, my cat-centric video blog! (hopefully this works…)

So, I had this vision of doing this great video that showed my views of multimodality with the cuteness of my cat, but when I actually sat down to do it, I realized a) my cat doesn’t want to be followed around with a phone pointed at her, b) I don’t really know how to use my phone, and c) my house is pretty dirty so maybe I should have rented a sound stage or something (God forbid I actually clean.)

Normally, I would just do an in-depth analysis of the texts, but I thought I would give the video blog thing a shot. I tried to then upload the video, but it was too long (Or perhaps too rambling) to post, so I uploaded it to YouTube, as you can see. In this exercise, I realized how much effort it takes to make a video blog, and if my students were to want to do that, good for them. I love the idea of allowing my students to express themselves creatively (whether it’s successful or not) because it allows them to understand the concept I’m trying to teach in a different way.

Since I want to teach high school AP English Literature preferably, I think it would be incredibly interesting to see how students interpret the books they read. Of course, I would want them to write essays because the AP test kind of requires that, and I want them to be prepared for classes in college that want them to write essays (especially in English Lit classes if they decide to go that route.) But perhaps I could give them the choice to write essays for only a few books and then do something else for the others. Or, like one of my classes in grad school, have them do a creative kind of portfolio where they can do art, write stories, make videos, try to cook recipes related to the books, or whatever. We still had to write essays in that class, but we still had an outlet.

Multimodality makes the idea of teaching incredibly exciting. I hope it’s something I’d be able to implement in my own classroom (at least in the sense where I’m not behind the camera filming my cat.)