“There is ample evidence that people do not learn anything well unless they are both motivated to learn and believe that they will be able to use and function with what they are learning in some way that is in their interest” (The New London Group 33).

The New London Group’s statement about learning corresponds to Kahneman and Tversky’s psychological findings about decision making and risk. Not only do people need to think that that they will get something out of what they attempt to do, they need to believe that they will be able to use and function with what they are learning in some way that is in their interest. In other words, believing that you cannot or are not able to do something, even if you think it might be a good thing, greatly increases the likelihood that you will choose NOT to do it.

It’s very hard to find out if you can or cannot do something, really, unless you actually try it and I think for many teachers, having not tried digital and multimodal composing, it is easiest to simply ignore the long history of calls for the integration of multimodal composing activities for our students (Anderson;Kress & van Leeuwen; New London Group; Rice; Selfe; Wysocki et. al). After all, no matter how compellingly the theoretical case has been made, how do you teach rhetorically purposeful multimodal production practices if you don’t know what those production practices might be? Additionally, the process of multimodal composing is far more complex than a simple transference of textual information to other modes. As Sheppard notes:

Multimedia production practices are a sophisticated integration of knowing how and when to use appropriate technologies, where to find or how to create the necessary media resources, how to interact with the people involved with a project, and how to prepare the material for the context in which it will be used by its intended audience. (130)

Finding that sophisticated integration requires the kind of experience and experimentation in production that all writing teachers bring to the print classroom, and the work involved in is daunting. This is certainly an occasion to take the opportunity to learn from the literacies our students bring with them (Selfe “Students”; Yancey), but to successfully integrate multimodal composing into our teaching, we need to spend at least enough time tinkering to have an appreciation of how writing in multiple modes expands our existing frameworks and genres and creates meaning in and through the relationships between the different modes.

So, as scary as that sounds, we just have to do it.

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