Facilitating Creativity through Multimodal Writing: An Examination of Students’ Choices and Perceptions

Creativity has long been central in multimodal writing. Unlike traditional writing, which uses text alone, multimodal writing relies on the use of a combination of modes to convey meaning such as text, speech, images, audio, gesture, and space. Scholars of multimodal writing stressed that using multiple modes allows for greater creativity and newness. Recently, however, scholars have questioned whether creativity is so straightforward in students’ multimodal writing. Students may resist producing new types of writing. Their creativity outcome is dependent upon their preferences and their goals in the writing assignment. This article examines students’ choices when given the freedom to compose in any mode and their perceptions of their multimodal writing experience in comparison with traditional essay writing. Drawing on data from students’ multimodal products, surveys, and interviews we show how students simply used available resources in their multimodal composing and how creativity was negotiated. Although they identified several affordances for multimodal writing and described it as more interesting than conventional essay writing, they seemed to resist incorporating a variety of semiotic resources into their projects because their goal was to showcase their writing skills. We argue that developing explicit knowledge about various modes helps improve students’ understanding of multimodal writing as creative design.