Atwood and multimodality

(My apologies for the late post too! : P) 

As a few of my classmates have already mentioned, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” is written, and can be read somewhat, in a series of vignettes, making the possibility of allocating a specific episode/”moment” of the text to a small group of students feasible. I do think that a pictorial, or dramatic, representation of the text would work well, and deepen students’ understanding of its themes and characters, but perhaps, what is more important is how the use of multimodality may complement students’ learning of the text in the traditional way (i.e. through textual analysis).

What is needed then, is perhaps an amalgamation of textual and visual representation (and subsequently analysis) of the story – as Liz, Andrea, and Pepper have mentioned, students could recreate specific scenes from the text to demonstrate their understanding and further explore possibilities in the text. That would be the part on visual representation, following which, students may be asked to conduct a textual analysis of certain un-representable passages from “Significant Moments”.  They would be the more introspective passages in this text of reminiscences and narratives – such as, “I used to think my mother, in her earlier days . . . the stories were just the punctuation.)” (5), “It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating” (7). Such passages are important to the text as a whole, for it underlies the emotional nuances permeating the text – in order to aid more fruitful, meaningful discussion, I would want students to look at these passages closer, and relate them to the (visual) “representability” of the other scenes in the text. Perhaps, after students have worked out a visual representation of the text (or rather, some excerpts) in class, they will return home to do a reflection-cum-textual analysis of the “unrepresentable” passages (as picked out earlier) on a class blog. For as important as it is to engage students’ multiple intelligences by using multimodal means of teaching and learning in the classroom, it is as important to complement these approaches with the traditional mode of learning literature – in-depth textual analysis, but done in one’s own time, on a blog where one’s classmates and teacher may further add on to one’s thoughts and generate a deeper level of discussion.