Remixing and Rethinking with Multimedia Projects in the English Classroom
The field of composition pedagogy has seen more than its fair share of changes in the
past few decades, but never before have these changes been as fast-paced and necessary as now,
in the 21st century. With the expansion of what it means to be literate, students today are
expected to be able to compose in more than just the typical words-in-a-row essay. Now, they are
expected to be able to navigate between reading, writing, visual imagery, oral compositions, and
to keep up with other technological advances as they occur. There is no longer one way for
students to be considered literate and educators must begin to change the way they teach in order
to meet the needs of today’s students. One of the best ways for teachers to help the 21st century
student become literate and compose in ways that are meaningful to his or her life is through the
use of remixing in the classroom. Remixing (as a form of visual and digital literacy) in the
secondary English classroom can aid students in developing a deeper, more critical
understanding of a text, increase motivation, build a strong sense of community, and enable
students to engage in creative and reflective ways of learning that will help them become better
writers.
Today, the research essay is no longer the most beneficial way for students to present
materials being studied. Research essays are becoming more and more outdated on a daily basis,
and education needs to keep up with the trends. With students and other large corporations
around the globe taking advantage of composing through emails, text messaging, blogs, wikis,
social networking sites, and more, it is imperative that English educators begin to transform the
way they teach the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum. In “Beyond Technology for
Technology’s Sake” the authors state that there is a monumental shift from “traditional literacy to
twenty-first century multiliteracies,” which, “have impacted the nature of texts, as well as the way
people use and interact with texts” (87). Because of these changes, it is imperative that teachers
help their students learn how to analyze all of these digital and visual genres and compose within
multiple media forms. This will help students begin to determine for themselves the best methods
to use when conveying specific information, for example, when to use a PowerPoint versus a
short video, etc. This constant analysis of the writing process will help students learn when to
write in one genre versus another, and to actively apply this knowledge in other areas of their
writing lives as well.
Although it may not be obvious to some, remixing is writing and is even more
complex than the typical words-in-a-row essay. The remixing process is a rather lengthy one, but
one that pays off in many ways. Its process usually goes from brainstorming, to researching, to
planning, to storyboarding, to drafting/scene writing, to revising as many times as necessary
until it is considered to be “ready” for production. Once ready, it goes into the production phase,
which has its own editing process. Remixing can be significantly more work than the traditional
essay, but at the same time, it increases student’s critical thinking through metacognition and
tends to captivate the students’ interest (Herrington et al 101). Carolyn Miller Handler calls this
type of excitement over learning the “Lean Back Versus Lean Forward Effect” (57). Leaning back
learning is when students can just lean back, relax, and passively let knowledge come to them,
while active learning and entertainment has them leaning forward, engaged, and excited for
what is coming next. The lean forward method excites students because they have choice and
control over what is happening in their projects (57). Giving students this agency over their work
in a nontraditional manner like remixing will help students write in creative and meaningful
ways, prompting them to lean forward and get to work.
These active multimedia remixes can be defined as any project that allows students
to combine two or more of the following: text, images, graphics, sounds, and digital components.
They can be made of paper-based materials such as books, light-based materials such as slide
shows, audio-based clips such as podcasts, moving-based images such as TV shows, and
digitally-based projects such as a computer-created video on a program like iMovie (Green 2-3).
Timothy Green and Abbie Brown state that “Student-produced multimedia projects can help
develop visual and media literacy skills by providing students with opportunities to examine the
component parts of multimedia and the ways in which each of the parts are used to create
elaborate and evocative presentation” (2). Through the complex examination and analysis of
these multiple genres, students will begin to understand more deeply the intricacies of the
composition process.
When students compose in the traditional words-in-a-row format they tend to take
the writing process for granted and turn on their “auto pilot.” They are so used to writing in the
exact same, formulaic manner that they’ve been writing in since elementary school that they tend
to get an assignment and “just start writing” with little to no thought about their purpose,
audience, message, and voice. But when composing through remixing/multimedia texts, students
are no longer permitted to be passive writers, they must learn how to begin making active
decisions and how to choose the best genre to convey their message. This could be in the form of
a print brochure, an informative commercial for the public, a PowerPoint presentation for a
company, a flash poem, etc. Remixing is so incredibly powerful because it forces students to
analyze the genres they could possibly use to meet the requirements of the assignment and defend
their decisions about why they made those choices. It also teaches them how best to convey the
content and message of their project to their specific audience. Remixing makes students critical
thinkers and will help them define the ultimate purpose behind their project and create goals for
their research and compositional process, goals that will be meaningful to them, and goals they
can work toward with a strong sense of agency.
As Simkins et al. says, “Audience is a key word. The point of making a multimedia
presentation is to communicate a message to an audience” (12). Allowing students to choose the
best method for conveying their message will increase their sense of agency over their writing and
help them to choose topics that are not only important to them, but which also allows them to
work with the types of media they enjoy composing within. In his text “Media Convergence:
Creating Content, Questioning Relationships” Johnathan Alexander points out that there are
“visual and textual modes of meaning making,” and in this “media convergence,” one has the
power and potential to “create complex and rich sites of meaning” (2). Students have the potential
to do so many new and exciting things with the technology available to them, that ELA teachers
would be doing their students a huge disservice by ignoring the importance of this media
convergence. Right now, students willingly spend hours creating homemade YouTube videos for
friends or parodies of their favorite music video on their own time and with a fair amount of ease
and a tremendous amount of pleasure. These videos may appear to be “amateur,” but if looked at
closely, have a clear purpose and audience- two aspects of writing that all ELA teachers wish
their students to learn. In the creation of these videos, conscious decisions must be made about
what to include in the final product. If educators can begin to blend digital media creation with
the teaching of writing, great advances in students writing can be made. Alexander talks about
the “mixing and matching” of media to produce these complex and incredibly rich and
sophisticated texts (2), a new media writing practice that can no longer be ignored in the ELA
classroom. Already a popular practice amongst teens and students, it would be silly to disregard
remixing’s potential in educational institutions.
In the classroom, remixing is being used as a means of taking something that has
been read and discussed in class and creating something unique, something that has been
fashioned out of new or pre-existing materials. Like mash-ups on YouTube, performances from
the perspective of another character, or flash poetry based on a novel, students can use
technology as a means of composition. Remixing is also a way for students to display what they
have learned in one context and transform that into another context through metacognition, or
informed decision-making. And the wonderful thing is that the final product is something that
can be presented proudly and powerfully to an attentive audience of peers, teachers, or community
members. As Lawrence Lessig said in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a
Hybrid Economy, “For anyone who has lived in our era, a mix of images and sounds makes its
point far more powerfully than any eight-hundred word essay in the New York Times could” (74).
Remixing is so effective because it makes use of images, words, sounds, and any other medium it
needs, to make a significant impact on its audience. Through conscious decision-making skills,
students can gain agency over their works and become “producers and participants” of a culture
rather than just consumers of the texts teachers give them. Remixing is NOT taking the original
text and just redoing the exact same script in a new medium, it is the making of something new
through conscious decisions throughout the creative process. Students must think of the best
medium in which to portray their message, their purpose must be clear and concise, they must
have full agency over their work, and they must have a strong sense of audience awareness. By
bringing remixing into the classroom, teachers will be opening up the door for student success
through digital literacy.
One of the best things about multimedia projects like remixing is that they easily
lend themselves to becoming collaborative projects, and it is often said that collaboration
increases student motivation and excitement to learn and produce exciting pieces in the ELA
classroom. Authors Green and Brown point out that not only is collaboration exciting for
students, but professional multimedia projects are also collaborative and demand “the skills and
talents of a number of people working together for a common goal” (22). They suggest that when
putting students in groups, every individual is given a role to perform (23). Some of these roles
can be production manager, graphic artist, designer, talent director, etc. They also suggest that
students performing each role have the opportunity to workshop with members of other groups
who are performing the same role. This will allow each group member to get tips from the
teacher, talk to others who may be experiencing similar concerns, and generate ideas for how to
handle their assigned task (23). Workshopping with others can help alleviate some of the
pressure group members may be feeling and also help generate more creativity in the classroom.
Not only will the inclusion of remixing in the classroom allow students to work
together in collaborative ways, it will also help them make conscious decisions when creating
their projects. When teaching students how to remix and create this new patchwork collage from
previous ideas and concepts, teachers need to make the students’ thought process visible so
everyone begins to understand the thoughts and experiences that inform each individual’s current
decision-making. In their book, Metacognition, Strategy Use, and Instruction, authors Waters
and Schneider say that educators need to teach students how to think about the writing process,
make conscious decisions about genre, audience, and purpose, and decide how and when to
apply their knowledge. Along with that, students need to learn how to self-monitor their
understanding and make sure their writing is meeting all the goals they set out to accomplish
(228). At its most basic level, metacognition can be defined as “1) knowledge about cognition, or
thinking, and 2) deliberate, conscious regulation and control of cognitive activity, which
demands self-regulation” (227).
Metacognition is vital to the teaching of remixing in the classroom because digital
literacy will be a relatively new educational genre for many students and its important for them to
start thinking about the creative process as they go through it. Metacognition will help students
be more conscious about their work from the time they get their assignment and plan it out, all
the way to the moment they revise it and turn it in. Instructing students in such a way that allows
them to think about their process can lead to higher quality work and production (229). Waters
and Schneider say that metacognitive activities are the things that separate strong writers from
struggling writers. Strong writers think about their process and what works for them so they can
continue to monitor and evaluate their own work (230-231). Metacognition in creating a remixed
project will help students create goals and reflect on their practices until those goals are met.
Some of the things teachers can do to increase metacognition in the remixing classroom is to first
set clear goals for a project, give students strategies to use when writing and creating these
pieces, model the strategies suggested, give students the chance to practice those strategies, offer
feedback on how they are doing, and continuously monitor and support students (240-241).
Incorporating remixing and other forms of multimodal projects in the classroom
doesn’t have to be hard, stressful, or inconvenient. In fact, using technology in the classroom
often times compliments the curriculum and meets standards such as reading challenging and
complex texts and composing and engaging in all aspects of the writing process (Borsheim 88).
Starting out, teachers can ask students to simply transform their traditional research paper into a
new medium. One school that does this is the J. Graham Brown School in Louisville, Kentucky.
Students at this school know that in order to graduate they must complete a senior project that is
presented to a panel of judges from the neighboring community. These projects are initiated
through students’ personal curiosity to learn more about a topic of interest to them. They spend all
year reading about it, researching it, interviewing people, writing, revising, and finding the most
successful modes in which to present their information (Herrington 109). One student presented
his final project, “Splashing Through Still Waters: The Crippling of Zambia as a result of AIDS
and Hydrologic Poverty,” to the Senior Board Panel through a combination of audio, video, and a
PowerPoint presentation (108). These presentations not only meet state and national standards
for reading and writing curriculums, but they do so in real-world, meaningful ways (107) and
show the community how students can present what they have learned in new ways and
demonstrate not only knowledge of that material, but also how they can apply it to life (109).
Several drafts of the paper are collected throughout the year, workshops are offered on numerous
topics in the composition process (both written and digital), and individual conferences between
teacher and student happen on a weekly basis (111). These students are highly motivated and
their work is self-directed, just like it would be in the working world.
Students at the Brown school are taught valuable lessons about what it means to be an
active and participating member of society, while also learning skills important to the ELA
classroom such as how to develop ideas, audience awareness, voice, purpose, message, sentence
structure, organization, and more (121). It would be difficult for even the most anti-
remixing/multimodal/technology educator to deny the significance of what is happening at
Brown and other schools across the world. But such an in-depth and time-consuming project
may not be for everyone. There are plenty of other ways for teachers to start integrating remixing
into the classroom in more manageable ways. Teachers can also help students develop podcasts
(for free) through websites such as PodBean and iTunes. Here, students can learn about the
importance of aurality and how the voice can be used as a powerful compositional tool. They can
create movie trailers from the perspective of a different character, one other than the protagonist.
Students can create flash poems from themes they gathered in their latest novel. Public Service
Addresses can be filmed in groups. Brochures can be created, printed, and distributed to the
school and community. The list of meaningful projects that can come from using remixing and
multimedia projects in the classroom seems almost endless, and it can be if teachers remain open
to the possibilities technology brings into our classrooms and our literate lives.
As The New London Group has pointed out, “the very nature of language learning has
changed” (64). Because of these transformations, it has never been more important than now to
define what it means to be literate in this ever-expansive, socially dynamic world. Unfortunately,
many educators still feel as though teaching the typical words-in-a-row text are all they need to
focus on in their students’ education, but this is not the case. In order to keep up with the
advances being made in converging media platforms and how we communicate across the globe,
schools must begin to redefine the term literacy in a manner that suits the changing face of
schools, businesses, and communication the world over.
Although no definition of literacy could ever be perfect or all encompassing, the
attempt to do so will begin to illustrate the importance of having students compose within a
multitude of ways, rather than exclusively in reading and writing like curriculums of the past have
focused on. Students who do not know how to navigate the World Wide Web, compose texts
online, and communicate across multiple channels, will be less likely to obtain a job compared to
someone who is skilled in these areas. As Cynthia Selfe has pointed out in a chapter of Writing
New Media, “Evidence of this fact is clear if we examine the increasing importance—for many
citizens in our country and around the world—of being able to access and act on information
presented online in new media texts as well as to produce such texts themselves” (Wysocki et al.
55). The very nature of texts and what it means to be literate is wildly different than it was twenty
years ago, and schools need to make sure students are ready to meet these challenges head-on
with authentic, hands-on learning experiences with new media texts.
Even though many schools are hesitant to change their curriculums due to its time
consuming nature, today’s youth are “increasingly inattentive and disinterested in school”
because they don’t see how what they are learning is important outside of the classroom
(Alvermann 50). Unless teachers and educational systems begin to meet the needs of the 21st
century student and make learning relevant to their student’s lives and the advances happening in
society through teaching methodologies like remixing and multimedia projects, they will only
serve to homogenize our youth and impede the potential of students everywhere.
Works Cited
Alexander, Johnathan. “Media Convergence: Creating Content, Questioning
Relationships.” Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 1-8. Print.
Alvermann, Donna E., ed. Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World. Peter Lang:
New York, 2002. Print.
Borsheim, Carlin et al. “Beyond Technology for Technology’s Sake: Advancing
Multiliteracies in the Twenty-First Century.” The Clearing House. 82.2, (2008):
87-91. Print.
Green, Timothy D. and Abbie Brown. Multimedia Projects in the Classroom: A Guide to
Development and Evaluation. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press, Inc., 2002. Print.
Herrington, Anne, et al. Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and
Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom. New York: Teachers College,
2009. Print.
Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy.
New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Print.
Miller, Carolyn Handler. Digital Storytelling: a creator’s guide to interactive
entertainment. Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2004. Print.
Selfe, Cynthia. “Students Who Teach Us.” Writing New Media: Theory and
Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Ed. Ann Francis
Wysocki et al. Utah State University Press: Logan, 2004. Print.
Simkins, Michael, et al. Increasing Student Learning Through Multimedia Projects.
Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2002. Print.
The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.”
Harvard Educational Review. 66.1 (1996): 60-92. Print.
Waters. Harriet and Wolfgang Schneider. Metacognition, Strategy Use, and
Instruction. New York: The Guilford Press, 2010. Print.
