Multimodal Text Sets Strategy Guide
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- Resources & Preparation |
- Instructional Plan |
- Related Resources |
- Standards
Overview
Teachers have been building text sets for classroom use for quite some time, but as our students’ world expands to include new types of media, we need to evolve by adopting a broader definition of text and adding new forms of texts to our classroom practice. Traditional text sets can gain new life by adding comics, film, or other media. Multimodal text sets allow teachers to differentiate for student needs and to bring a collection of texts on a topic or theme into the classroom that provides all students with diverse representation. The use of text sets can allow teachers who are required to use canonical texts to supplement or disrupt the status quo. By adopting a broad definition of text through the choice of a variety of media, teachers can engage all students.
Featured Resources
Template and Example
Immigrants: Denotation and Connotation Multimodal Text Set Example: In this text set example, the anchor text that all students will read is Great Immigrants, Great Americans: The Comic Book. I use this text set to discuss denotation and connotation of the words “immigrant” and “immigration” with my middle school students.
Related Resources
Grades 6–8 Lesson Plan—Standard Lesson
An Exploration of Text Sets: Supporting All Readers
Grades 6–12
Build Your Stack: Using Text Sets to Make Connections Across Human Experiences (Burkins, 2019)
Ciecierski, L., & Bintz, W. (2016). Paired texts: A way into the content area. Middle School Journal, 47(4), 32–44.
Nelson, E. T., & Opatz, M. O. (2023). Mirrors, windows, and mentors: Developing critical
mentor text sets to cultivate students’ writer identities. English Journal, 113(1), 75–83.
New York Times Text to Text: Text pairings among often taught texts and New York Times articles
Printouts
Websites
Preparation
Whether writing a one-day lesson plan or a month-long unit, I have loved building text sets to share with students. But curating a text set takes time. So, over my twenty-five-plus years of teaching, I’ve often been frustrated when I want to quickly find one of the text sets or even a specific resource I curated for a past lesson. Then, in 2022 while researching the use of graphic novels in the classroom, I came across Ashley K. Dallacqua’s article “Reading When the World Is on Fire: Teaching with Comics and Other Multimodal Text Sets.” In it, Dallacqua shares a text set a teacher used by a teacher featured in the article. At the time, I was also teaching an ELA methods class for sophomores and needed a way to teach them the joy of curating a text set in an easy, fun way. From experience with past groups, I also knew I needed to move students toward a broader definition of text and away from using only a novel or longer pieces of prose with students.
The table Dallacqua used to present her teacher’s text set seemed so simple yet so practical for classroom use. With a few minor tweaks, it quickly became a go-to resource for me when curating a new text set. Now I can “store” a text set in this one-stop document that I can return to for lesson planning or can quickly share with a colleague.
Session Introduction and Activities
Socratic Seminar: In this lesson activity, teachers will facilitate a Socratic seminar where students discuss the denotation and connotation of the word “immigrant.” Having read stories from Great Immigrants, Great Americans: The Comic Book, students will share and discuss the richness and diversity of the immigrant experience and the value that immigrants bring to our communities.
From Theory to Practice
Ashley Dallacqua and Annmarie Garcia Sheehan explain the value of reading multimodal texts includes:
- supporting the critical work English educators value
- cultivating empathy and supporting students in processing emotions
- providing diverse representation that challenges misrepresentation, sexualization, and erasure of women and other groups
Creating a multimodal text set can be done from scratch, choosing a multimodal medium as an anchor text that all students read or it can be done to disrupt, supplement, or bring additional texts into conversation with a text the teacher already uses in practice.
Dallacqua, A. K., & Sheehan, A. G. (2024). Real superheroes: Redefining heroism with a feminist intersectional text set. English Journal, 114(2).
Nelson, E. T., & Opatz, M. O. (2023). Mirrors, windows, and mentors: Developing critical mentor text sets to cultivate students’ writer identities. English Journal, 113(1), 75–83.
Instructional Plan
Questions to Consider in Pairing Texts
- What topics/subtopics are explored in this text?
- How do these texts “talk” to each other? What they do they add, correct, extend, align, and conflict around?
- What is the central text I want students to focus on and how will additional texts build out knowledge/possible student responses?
A Note about Teaching Controversial Topics
Depending on your school and community, tackling the connotations of the term “immigrant” in the classroom could be controversial. NCTE supports intellectual freedom and a teacher’s ability to choose topics and materials that meet the needs of their students.
NCTE provides the following resources to teachers who may face pushback from their school or local communities regarding the teaching of immigration or other topics they bring into the classroom:
Talking Immigration in the Classroom
NCTE Intellectual Freedom Center
The Students’ Right to Read Position Statement
Guidelines for Dealing with Censorship of Instructional Material Position Statement