"Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother" possesses some potential for multimodal teaching in the classroom. Given that the text reads somewhat like a series of connected vignettes, it can be easily divided into recognizable section. As such, a possible project for the students is for them to break into groups with each group assigned a section of the story. They are then required to do a brief storyboard of their section. After which, each storyboard can be pieced together as a class to create some sort of pictorial (or even film) adaptation of the story.
This, I found, is quite interesting as it brings up several discussion points such as how text differs from graphic or film representations. As the students are required to pick out the most significant scenes from the story to put in their storyboard, it inevitably means that some scenes are left out. Discussions about how having to read between the lines in text differs from reading the empty "spaces" in film can also take place. The difficulty of representing certain things in the storyboard might also surface for the students - how to represent internal dialogue/feelings, for example. Later when the students try to piece their storyboards together, they might feel that the order presented in the text might not work as well in the medium of film or pictures and decide to switch it up.
Like Brennan mentioned in his post, it is certainly important to keep the text central especially when bringing multimodality into the classroom. Such an activity, then, can highlight how text and multimodal representations can contain different meanings, forms and structures. This should (hopefully) get them to think twice when they watch a film adaptation of another lit text and assuming it equates reading the book. More importantly, this project also encourages independent thinking and creativity in the students by giving them "creative control" over how they decide to depict the text.
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