Read Significant moments in the life of my mother by Margaret Atwood.
What multimodal possibilties are there for studying this short story? Also, what
other thoughts do you have on multimodality in the Literature classroom?
The title of this short story can provide us with a clue as to how we can include multimodality while teaching this endearing short story to our students. First of all, we need to recognize the fact that Atwood's story is situated in a locale that is absolutely foreign to perhaps a majority of the students in class. There is both a time-place gap, the story is situated in a period with values and conceptions that are further from their knowledge of Canada or America.
I think we can use photographs of Canadian landscape to first familiarize the students with the almost rural background of the story. There is also a Feminist tone to the narrator's description of her mother. The students can be shown videos on the Women's Liberation movement of the 60s and its impact on women. They can then be asked to link what they saw from the videos to the story. A few moments from the film Monalisa Smile can be shown here, to show them how women were supposed to behave and how women who stepped out of the norm were treated. They can then be asked to infer from Atwood's story, how women are seen, how they are expected to behave and how any deviation from that behaviour affects them (for example, the mother's father would not fund her through college because he thinks she is "too frivolous-minded").
Multimodality is a reality and our students use different technologies and literacies without being aware of it. Therefore conventional literacies have a complementary role to play, utilizing the students' prior knowledge to enable them in constructing different kinds of meaning (Unsworth, 2001). Multimodality utilizes different semiotic systems to convey meaning (Bull and Ansley, 2010) and in a literature classroom it becomes of utmost importance, as using pictures and videos enables the students to visualize a situation that can be absolutely alien and unknowable for them. Different students have different learning systems, using multimodal texts caters to ones who are visual learners, learners with attention deficiency problems etc. Also, our students are digital natives and they connect better if we can pitch lessons utilizing technology and texts such as YouTube videos or films. The possibility in a literature classroom is therefore infinite.
The title of this short story can provide us with a clue as to how we can include multimodality while teaching this endearing short story to our students. First of all, we need to recognize the fact that Atwood's story is situated in a locale that is absolutely foreign to perhaps a majority of the students in class. There is both a time-place gap, the story is situated in a period with values and conceptions that are further from their knowledge of Canada or America.
I think we can use photographs of Canadian landscape to first familiarize the students with the almost rural background of the story. There is also a Feminist tone to the narrator's description of her mother. The students can be shown videos on the Women's Liberation movement of the 60s and its impact on women. They can then be asked to link what they saw from the videos to the story. A few moments from the film Monalisa Smile can be shown here, to show them how women were supposed to behave and how women who stepped out of the norm were treated. They can then be asked to infer from Atwood's story, how women are seen, how they are expected to behave and how any deviation from that behaviour affects them (for example, the mother's father would not fund her through college because he thinks she is "too frivolous-minded").
Multimodality is a reality and our students use different technologies and literacies without being aware of it. Therefore conventional literacies have a complementary role to play, utilizing the students' prior knowledge to enable them in constructing different kinds of meaning (Unsworth, 2001). Multimodality utilizes different semiotic systems to convey meaning (Bull and Ansley, 2010) and in a literature classroom it becomes of utmost importance, as using pictures and videos enables the students to visualize a situation that can be absolutely alien and unknowable for them. Different students have different learning systems, using multimodal texts caters to ones who are visual learners, learners with attention deficiency problems etc. Also, our students are digital natives and they connect better if we can pitch lessons utilizing technology and texts such as YouTube videos or films. The possibility in a literature classroom is therefore infinite.
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