Multimodality in action: New literacies as more than activity in middle and high school classrooms

In this chapter, the authors present two classroom portraits of a 5th and 9th grade classrooms as activity systems where teachers and learners are engaged in multimodal composing. In their analysis, they are most interested in how principles of design, affordances of modes, and multimodality become internalized as psychological tools that shape learning in the context of activity. The authors ask two research questions: What are the mediational artifacts (both ideal and material) in these activity settings? What does this reveal about multimodality as a socially situated process? Conclusions drawn from the two different cases lead the authors to suggest that multimodality must be carefully understood as part of an activity system.