Multimodal Compositions: Supporting Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of Their Role for Equitable Learning Outcomes in Secondary ELA

Multimodal composing (MMC) (Yancy, 2009) in teacher-education pedagogy was investigated for information on fostering English Language Arts pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) use of MMC in their planning, curricular design, and fieldwork implementation. The study addressed the problem of privileging print text in secondary English Language Arts for reading and writing. MMC brings writing into the 21^st Century, and promotes expression and use of writing for their own purpose as a schooled task (Beach et. al, 2016). This grounds MMCs in writing expectations that do more to sort students, using academic-writing tasks as gatekeepers that perpetuate inequity in student outcomes. Purposeful engagement of PSTs with MMC assignments in teacher education curricula revealed the importance of explicit instruction with PSTs in defining, engaging in design and production processes, and assessment approaches for MMCs.