Theories and Practices of Multimodal Education: The Instructional Dynamics of Picture Books and Primary Classrooms

In today’s primary classrooms, the definition of “text” has expanded to include multiple modes of representation, with combined elements of print, visual images, and design. Emergent research on literacy highlights the imaginative, interpretive, nonlinear, interactive, dynamic, visual, and mobile features of communication (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008). Although these interactive features of text are evident in many educational technologies, such as computers or SMART boards, they also are present in recently published children’s books. Long a staple of primary classrooms, current children’s literature embodies an expanded definition of text with multiple forms of representation beyond print. As Siegel (2006) noted, “language arts education can no longer ignore the way that our social, cultural, and economic worlds now require facility with texts and practices involving the full range of representational modes” (p. 65). It is our premise that teachers’ and students’ interactions with the characters, plots, and visuals of interactive children’s books can highlight new shifts in literacy learning. Our focus in this article is to describe multimodal education in terms of the theories and practices that make it feasible, even within the confines of standardized education today. In the first section, we lay the theoretical groundwork that helps us to explore multimodal aspects of texts and sociocognitive aspects of literacy learning. Next, we discuss an ongoing research project in which elementary school teachers (grades kindergarten, 1–2, and 2–3) collaborated with us to design and teach literacy curricula that uses children’s picture books with highly visual and interactive textual elements. We provide examples from two of these teachers’ classrooms to illustrate the ways in which (a) the multimodal aspects of texts set forth new roles for the reader/writer and (b) the sociocognitive aspects of multimodal education set forth new roles for the teacher. In the end, we discuss the instructional dynamics necessary for multimodal education via a pedagogy of multiliteracies (New London Group, 2000) that the teachers take up in their instructional design and pedagogic practice.