Describe an important site of multimodal communication in your life, or your students' lives. How might a multimodal analysis of meaning prove useful? How does this compare with traditional notions of literacy?

A site of multimodal communication that I am going to highlight is a collaboration among teachers that took place through instant-messaging on WhatsApp. The 4 teachers, me included, were newly hired in a university to teach an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. The course was based on a pedagogical approach (SFL) that was new to us, the teachers, and to our multilingual students. We were teaching what we just had just learned every week. Initially, the WhatsApp platform was used to create a group for informal updating and chatting – as one does on WhatsApp, but it quickly became a platform for intense daily communication about the content of the course, the methods, the marking, the students, and everything else in between. Each teacher had brought a specific kind of expertise to the table, and each contributed what they knew: theories were elaborated, concepts explained, and resources created and shared, with the occasional jokes, complaints, gossip and random thoughts. The messages included language, of course, but also web links, emoticons, photos and moving gifs. Downloaded in an Excel spreadsheet, there were approximately 5,000 entries over one 3-month semester, each entry representing a one time contribution to the discussion. (I cannot provide a link here as the data is confidential). The messages supported the teachers’ ongoing professional development, but it also provided emotional support - it is not easy teaching something you just learned and understood yourself; but such is teaching in university EAP programs nowadays. As seen in 'Ubiquitous Learning Through Mobile Devices in The Great Land', mobile learning "takes place during need-to-know or want-to-know situations. It involves using timely resources in the quest for relevant knowledge, problem solving, and communication of importance to the learner. These aspects are aided by the convenience and multimodal flexibilities of mobile phones." (https://cgscholar.com/creator/works/34888/versions/112304/export?output_format=standard )

This was a successful collaboration that I would like to explore by analyzing the WhatsApp content, in addition to other artifacts that had been used. Usually, collaborations are explored through observations, reflections and interviews; the use of text-messaging for professional collaborations is rarely acknowledged. A multimodal analysis of the text would be useful to uncover how meaning-making took place among the teachers: to see how each mode of communication and mode shifting, or synesthesia, contributed to professional or emotional support. It makes possible to discover other aspects of teachers’ lives that are otherwise hard to capture: the preparation and thoughtfulness that goes behind each lesson.