Creating a connected classroom: Engaging students with multimodal texts in the community college composition classroom.

摘要

Instructors have a unique opportunity in the community college classroom to create an atmosphere of student engagement and agency through the use of multi-modal texts. By helping students understand the critical thinking skills and varying levels of experience that they bring to the composition classroom, it is possible for an instructor to create a connected classroom between the rhetorical concepts discussed in the classroom and the function of those concepts in a student's daily life as well.;Film is one of many multi-modal texts that can serve as a bridge between the academic definition of a rhetorical concept and the functional definition of that concept. While the students bring some sense of functional literacy with them into the classroom, instructors expect these students to employ traditional literacy instead. Using texts that students may encounter during their leisure time helps establish a connection between the concept and the way that concept is used in a print text in an academic setting.;Through studying how students reacted to and engaged with film texts and print texts in one Heartland Community College Composition I classroom, it is possible to see the connection between functional and traditional literacy in the students' writing and responses. By valuing a more functional form of literacy and using it to create a bridge to a traditional form of literacy, instructors can encourage students to bring their own experiences into the classroom as a valid resource.