Multimodality and Atwood

(Hi all, apologies for the late post!)

As mentioned in several of the earlier posts, Atwood’s Significant Moments in the life of My Mother presents the reader with a series of connected vignettes and I would be interested in using frozen tableaus (ala what we did in the Kuo Pao Kun drama workshop lesson) when getting students to explore the text.

This lesson is best conducted somewhere more spacious than the classroom – preferably a dance studio where there is open space and minimal possibility of noise pollution. In groups of 4-5, students would be instructed to use their bodies and whatever props they can find to create a scene that is narrated in Atwood’s text. Give students an example to illustrate this – eg. One possibility would be the scene where Atwood’s mother stands in the dentist’s where her grandfather is “sitting in the chair, white with pain”, and she asks for permission to get her hair cut. Students should try to use facial expressions to convey what they believe the characters are feeling at that particular moment. I think that using frozen tableaus is particularly effective in getting students to place themselves in the characters’ shoes and imagine what characters’ emotions might be! Also, tell students that they will “unfreeze” from their role when tapped on (by the teacher) and present a short interior monologue, voicing the thoughts of the character/prop/spectator they are meant to play. Encourage their classmates to ask questions on how they came up with this tableau – why they chose this scene, why the characters are in a certain position etc. 

I agree with Melissa that we must keep in mind our rationale for using multimodal approaches  - rather than feel compelled to use, for example, films, ICT or blogs in our literature classrooms, we should first ask ourselves whether our students’ understanding and appreciation of the texts in question will be deepened by a multimodal teaching approach. In other words, the use of multimodal approaches should not be contrived. I also think that whilst it is important that we acknowledge the value in firstly, developing our students’ abilities to appreciate multimodal texts and secondly, respond to a text in a variety of modes, we need to also acknowledge that most of our students will be sitting for a pen-and-paper examination. Like it or not, this means that our use of multimodality in class cannot lead to a compromise in the academic rigor that examinations demand of our students.