Working with Multimodality: Rethinking Literacy in a Digital Age

In today’s digital world, we have multiple modes of meaning-making: sounds, images, hypertexts. Yet, within literacy education, even ‘new’ literacies, we know relatively little about how to work with and produce modally complex texts.

In Working with Multimodality, Jennifer Rowsell focuses on eight modes: words, images, sounds, movement, animation, hypertext, design and modal learning. Throughout the book each mode is illustrated by cases studies based on the author’s interviews with thirty people, who have extensive experience working with a mode in their field. From a song writer to a well known ballet dancer, these people all discuss what it means to do multimodality well.

This accessible textbook brings the multiple modes together into an integrated theory of multimodality. Step-by-step, beginning with theory then exploring modes and how to work with them, before concluding with how to apply this in an investigation, each stage of working with multimodality is covered.

Working with Multimodality will help students and scholars to:
• Think about specific modes and how they function
• Consider the implications for multimodal meaning-making
• Become familiar with conventions and folk knowledge about given modes
• Apply this same knowledge to their own production of media texts in classrooms

Assuming no prior knowledge about multimodality and its properties, Working with Multimodality is designed to appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in how learning and innovation is different in a digital and media age and is an essential textbook for courses in literacy, new media and multimodality within applied linguistics , education and communication studies.

Jennifer Rowsell holds a Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies at Brock University, Canada. She is co-author of Design Literacies (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies (forthcoming).