Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? I picture two virtuosos playing opposite each other in a concert hall, but the term actually refers to creating a multimodal text in which “old and new literacy practices, including print texts and visual texts, may be fruitfully taught side by side” (Leander). This multimodal text may be any combination of print, visuals, and audio — and, I guess if you’re in person, you could really make this text convey even more by making it have a smell or interesting texture . . . but I’m not sure how plausible that would be in the classroom (you probably don’t want all these different smells clogging up your classroom space, and students may or may not want other students touching their work . . . ).

To illustrate how parallel composing can be taken up in the classroom, I created this video, in which I combined images, music, and text to compose a student’s “I am From” (or “Where I’m From”) poem. The print text itself is actually from one of my students this past semester (I kept true to almost all of the original text, including capitalization and punctuation, but I edited one word for spelling and one slide for grammar). I was blown away by her and my other students’ “Where I’m From” poems, and it is one of my favorite assignments to give to students. During my student teaching, I also observed one teacher have her students turn their poems into videos like the one above, and I just thought it was so cool to add that much more thought and depth to their work, work that they believed in.

Plus, this type of creative assignment reflects the Georgia state standards for secondary English:

• ELAGSE9-12W4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• ELAGSE9-12W10: Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences ELAGSE9-12W4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Upon Reflection:

I hope I did my student’s poem some semblance of justice. It was short, but so meaningful to me to get to know my student on a deeper level. I chose every picture intentionally, trying to capture what I thought was her intention with her words. Naturally, my personal interpretation lead me to choose certain pictures over others (and sometimes I couldn’t find the “right” picture), and I’m sure my student would have chosen others, but I guess that’s part of the beauty of perspective, of poetry, and of sharing what others’ creations mean to you. In addition, I chose the music from the freely available choices on the platform I used, Adobe Spark. In terms of variety, there wasn’t the greatest of musical options, and I wanted to pick one that conveyed some degree of seriousness and sincerity, as opposed to the happy-go-lucky plucky guitar numbers or dainty piano pieces. There is an option to upload your own music, but I was already a tad overwhelmed with my choices provided by the website, so I went with one of those. I imagine students would love to upload their own music, however, and I did see students doing this when I observed the teacher and her students that I mentioned above.

Additionally, there is an option to record your own audio, like you can on VoiceThread and Animoto. If I were to have students do this sort of parallel composing activity with “Where I’m From” poems, I would have them record themselves reading their poem so we could see how they read it aloud, which would add another layer of complexity and insight into their multimodal composition. Unfortunately, AdobeSpark had some constraints that limited the range of possible rhetorical moves. For example, while you could choose a “theme” to overlay on your whole video (which affects the colors and fonts, you couldn’t alter these features for each slide. If you noticed, the font on my first slide is different than the font on the subsequent slides; to someone who likes to micromanage at the smallest level, this is rather annoying.

Like other video-creating/editing platforms, I couldn’t explore the extensiveness of the features that Adobe Spark provides, but I would say that it’s a mediocre platform (i.e. it gets the job done). It has a smaller watermark than Animoto, which is nice, but I ran into an annoying glitch two times when I attempted to preview my video. The video would stop playing and I wouldn’t be able to play it again by reloading the page. Instead, I had to go to another browser (with less tabs), and it worked that way. If I were using Adobe Spark in the classroom, I wouldn’t want their videos not to play for students on account of crappy school bandwidth or some other slow internet issue, so Adobe Spark is iffy for me.

To close, I would like to post some questions that I read from David L. Bruce in “Learning Video Grammar: A Multimodal Approach to Reading and Writing Video Texts” and would like to adopt in my classroom when exploring multimodal texts. In examining print texts alongside other versions like films or commercials, Bruce encourages students to engage with the following questions:

• Who created this message?
• What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
• How might different people understand this message differently from me?
• What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
• What is the message being sent?

Even simple texts like the “Where I’m From” video I made on Adobe Spark could be examined with these questions and result in some interesting answers. I think it’s important that these questions be asked because, like Bruce says, they “are great prompts for pushing the conversation to a critical analysis,” one of the hallmarks of the secondary English Language Arts curriculum.