Asking Big Questions: Four Multimodal Novels to Shift the Way Students Compose

Meet our Contributor

Lauren Vandever, M.Ed., works as a district instructional coach in rural Oklahoma, but in her heart, she is always in a 7th-grade classroom. Lauren is also a Ph.D. student in Literacies and Language Arts Education at Oklahoma State University. With 12 years of classroom experience, she is passionate about growing educators, fostering teacher efficacy, and exploring multimodality and meaningful literacy practices that support student learning. Outside of studying and teaching, Lauren enjoys running her nieces and nephews around, plus spending time with her wife, three dogs, and two cats. 

Asking Big Questions: Four Multimodal Novels to Shift the Way Students Compose by Lauren Vandever

When I started my PhD two years ago, I knew going in I wanted to work with middle school literacy and multimodality. What that meant at the time, I had no idea. But I knew those were two areas close to my heart that did not get enough attention from others.
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As I have journeyed through my PhD program as a Literacies and Language Arts scholar, my professors and projects have pushed me to continually ask, “In what way do I want to write this?” Through this question, I have come to learn something important about myself: my methodology of expression is a/r/tography. A/r/tography is a methodology that encompasses multiple identities within one word. The first three letters of the word represent the three identities that a/r/tography encompasses: artist, researcher, and teacher. Each one of these identities sits alongside the others with no hierarchy. In fact, a/r/tography encourages blending and mixing these identities across projects (Irwin et al., 2006). The word a/r/tography sets apart each identity with purposefully placed slashes, using the field of grapholinguistics – a subfield of linguistics that asks: What is communicated by the way words are written, arranged, displayed, or visually designed? (Meletis & Dürscheid, 2022). 

This methodology informs and inspires the way I tackle my own personal writing as well as scholarly writing. My work asks big questions as a researcher, wants to help educate others as a teacher, and wants to find ways of including artistic engagements to stimulate learners across multiple discourses. My brain asks not “What happens in the text?” Instead, how are we going to convey the meaning through words alongside form and function?

Long before I had the academic vocabulary for it, these were the same kinds of questions I brought into my seventh-grade ELA classroom. I leaned into multimodality in my slides, my project choices, and my read-alouds. I always found that middle schoolers were not given enough support with text. For me, multimodality allowed struggling readers new avenues to hold onto text and find a door to open for their own understanding (Kang, 2022; Smith, 2017).

The same is true about asking students to write. Educators sometimes make composing harder than it needs to be. We give students a topic. We give them a genre. We give them a structure. We give them a rubric. And then we ask them to make something meaningful within all of those boundaries. What if we showed them that writers don’t have to stick to traditional publishing guidelines? What if we allowed them to read and write the way they think: multimodally?

What is a Multimodal Novel?

This question has become increasingly interesting to me as I have been reading contemporary middle-grade and young adult multimodal novels. These are books that construct stories through collections of “documents”—text messages, interviews, photographs, drawings, maps, recipes, newspaper articles, letters, annotations, search results, and other forms that readers might encounter outside of traditional novel prose.

And I don't think the most interesting thing about these books is simply that they look different. The interesting thing is that the form is doing narrative work. The documents aren't illustrations of the story. They are the story.

Kress's (2010) work on multimodality has helped me put language to something I keep seeing in these books. Multimodality asks readers and writers to think about modes not simply as different ways of decorating or delivering the same message, but as resources with different affordances. Kress (2010) wrote, “Different modes offer different potentials for making meaning. These different potentials have a fundamental effect on the choice(s) of mode in specific instances of communication” (p. 79). Writing can do some things particularly well. Images can do others. Layout, gesture, sound, movement, and other resources bring their own possibilities to communication.

A multimodal text isn't necessarily one where someone wrote a paragraph and then decided to add a picture. A multimodal text positions literacy as questions:
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• Why this mode?
• What can it do?
• What does it make visible?
• What does it allow us to know?
• What does it allow us to hide?
• And what happens when two modes work together?

I am interested in them because they make compositional decisions visible. Student readers and writers benefit from seeing how authors make decisions, as well as that not all writing has to look the same (Gallagher & Kittle, 2018). 

Instead, student writers need the freedom to think:

• The author could have written the scene as a chapter. Instead, it became a text message.
• The author could have explained a relationship through narration. Instead, we get an interview.
• The author could have described a memory. Instead, we encounter a photograph, a note, or an artifact.

​The form itself becomes part of the author's meaning-making. And that matters for our classrooms because students are making these kinds of choices all the time—whether we explicitly teach them to or not.

Students Are Already Making These Choices

Smith's (2017) research with adolescents found that multimodal composing was not a simple process of adding different modes to a finished piece of writing. Students moved across modes in complex and varied ways as they developed their compositions. Their choices were shaped by the tools available to them, their purposes, and the work they were trying to accomplish.

​In another study, Smith (2018) examined how adolescents composed websites, a hypertext literary analysis, and a podcast in response to literature. The students were composing for multiple purposes and audiences at the same time. They were also thinking about how their compositions could affect an audience and represent themselves as composers.

That is part of what can get lost when we treat multimodal composition as a fun alternative to “real writing.” It is writing. It is composing. It is making decisions about how we want other people to encounter our ideas.

Research by Kang (2022) similarly found that adolescent English learners did not simply use modes because they were available. Students personalized, modified, avoided, and orchestrated different semiotic resources. Their choices were connected to audience awareness, genre knowledge, and identity.

​That sounds a lot like the work writers already do. We just don't always call it that. Multimodal composition simply makes some of those decisions harder to ignore. 

Four Multimodal Books, Four Questions

As I work to figure out what my dissertation topic will be, I have started a collection of multimodal novels for content analysis. Below, I have curated four: two middle grade and two young adult, to demonstrate the power of these novels and how they teach students not to answer questions, but to ask them.

• Janice Hallett's A Box Full of Murders series (2025; 2026)
• Kwame Alexander and Jerry Craft's J vs. K (2025)
• Christen Randall's According to Plan (2026)
• Jessica Walker's The Secret Astronomers (2025)

Rather than asking students to identify the “multimodal elements” in each book, I ask them to ask themselves:

• Why this form?
• What can this medium do?
• What does it allow the author to reveal?
• What does it allow the author to withhold?
• Whose voice becomes possible?
• What might be different if this scene were written as traditional prose?
• And perhaps most importantly: What does this form make the reader do?

​Each of these books supports these questions as well as leans into answering a unique question of form. 

A Box Full of Murders series: What if the story were made of documents?

When siblings Ava and Luke discover a box of old documents in an attic, they get pulled into solving an unsolved murder mystery. The story unfolds across two novels purely through non-traditional media—such as diary entries, police reports, incident forms, and text messages exchanged between the siblings—inviting the reader to act as a detective alongside them. The effect is immediate: readers encounter the story through fragmented pieces rather than one continuous narrative voice.

• A report does something different from an email.
• A diary entry does something different from a newspaper article.
• A diagram can communicate relationships spatially rather than through paragraphs.

​Each document brings its own perspective and limitations.

​So instead of simply asking students, What happened?, we can ask:
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• Why did the author choose this form?
• What can we learn from this document that we might not learn from a narrator?
• What information is missing because of the form?
• How do pieces of everyday life come together to create a compelling story?

Hallett’s body of work exemplifies this dynamic, consisting of novels that ask readers to find their own answers throughout the text. 

Box Full of Murders #1

Box Full of Murders #2

Bos Full of Murders #3

Death at the Museum #1

Death at the Museum #2

J vs. K: What if different ways of composing could coexist?

Kwame Alexander and Jerry Craft's J vs. K gives us a different possibility. Fifth graders, J and K represent opposite ends of creative expression: J loves to draw but hates to read, while K loves to write but can't draw. Told through a mix of poems, prose, comics, and visual art, their rivalry challenges both characters to learn how different forms of storytelling can complement one another.

The book doesn't just tell readers that people have different ways of expressing themselves. It shows us. And that creates an interesting opportunity for students to answer these questions for themselves:
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• What can an image communicate that words cannot?
• What can words communicate that an image cannot?
• What happens when we put them together?
• What happens when one form changes the meaning of another?
• What happens when I work with another writer to blend our styles?

This is the kind of question that moves multimodal composition away from “Add a picture to your writing” and toward something much more intentional.

​According to Plan: What (or who) can a form make visible?

Christen Randall's According to Plan gives us another opportunity to think about form, identity, and the ways stories can be constructed. When their high school literary magazine gets canceled, nonbinary senior Mal Flowers sees their careful plan for college applications fall apart. Encouraged by a charismatic classmate, Mal agrees to go rogue and co-create an underground zine, leading to self-discovery, romance, and new ways to express their identity outside rigid guidelines. Rather than approaching multimodal texts as a checklist of interesting formats, Randall chooses specific formats that make the narrative feel authentic to students.

• What does this form allow us to know?
• Whose perspective becomes visible?
• What might feel different if this experience were filtered entirely through traditional narration?
• When something doesn’t work out for me, how can I shift my work to make something new?

​These questions shift our attention away from the novelty of a book's design and toward the author's compositional decisions.

The Secret Astronomers: What if the medium became part of the story?

Jessica Walker's The Secret Astronomers perhaps pushes this question even further. Set in a small town where Wi-Fi is restricted, a grieving teenager named Copernicus begins scribbling notes and drawings inside an old 19th-century library astronomy textbook. After a classmate named Kepler responds via sticky notes, the two launch an analog correspondence within the textbook pages, eventually working together to unravel a mystery tied to their parents' pasts. The textbook isn't simply a setting or prop. It becomes the space where the story happens.
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We aren't simply reading a story about these young people. We are encountering the traces they leave behind. This novel requires students to consider not only what multimodality can do in digital spaces, but what happens when technology is stripped away entirely—forcing both characters and readers to ask: How do we build connection using only the tangible traces we leave behind? 

Multimodality is….Reading Like a Writer, Composing Like a Designer 

Again, this is where Kress's  (2010) idea of affordances becomes useful. The question isn't whether a photograph, handwritten note, or page layout is “better” than prose. The question is what that resource makes possible in this particular story.
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The medium isn't neutral. The choice matters. Reading Like a Writer. Composing Like a Designer. We often ask students to “read like writers.” Notice the author's word choice. Study the sentence structure. Look at how the author develops a character. Pay attention to pacing. Then, try that move in your own writing. Multimodal novels give us another layer:

Read like a designer.

• Why this medium?
• Why this layout?
• Why this artifact?
• Why this perspective?
• Why this order?
• Why leave this information out?
• Why give the reader this piece but not another?

These questions are not separate from writing.
They are writing.

Smith's (2017) research suggests that adolescent multimodal composers are already navigating questions of audience, purpose, affect, identity, and cohesion as they design their work. By making the author's compositional decisions visible, these novels require readers to make choices of their own as they navigate among scattered clues, documents, and visual artifacts. Instead of simply reading from someone else’s perspective, students are thrust directly into the narrative world, taking on the role of a detective to solve the case—a design choice that mirrors how adolescent creators themselves orchestrate media to deeply immerse their audience (Smith, 2018). Kang's (2022) work similarly demonstrates that adolescents make choices among modes based on audience, genre, and identity—and that those choices can develop as students compose.

So maybe our job isn't to convince students that multimodal composition is “real” writing. Maybe our job is to help them recognize the composing decisions they are already making and give them more tools for making those decisions intentionally. That is what I love about these books. They don't just show students what a story can look like. They show students that composing is a process of making intentional decisions about medium, perspective, audience, evidence, and meaning.

The question is no longer simply: How do I write this story?
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It becomes: What is the best way to tell this part of the story? And maybe, before students ever put a word on the page, we should give them permission to ask an even more interesting question: What if this scene were a search history?

​References:

Alexander, K., & Craft, J. (2025). J vs. K. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Gallagher, K., & Kittle, P. (2018). 180 days: Two teachers guide curriculum design in middle and high school. Stenhouse Publishers

Hallett, J. (2025). A box full of murders. Penguin Books.

Hallett, J. (2026). Death at the museum. Penguin Books.

Irwin, R. L., Beer, R., Springgay, S., Grauer, K., Xiong, G., & Bickel, B. (2006). The rhizomatic relations of a/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 70–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2006.11650500

Kang, J. (2022). Developing multimodal communicative competence: adolescent English learners' multimodal composition in an after-school programme. Literacy, 56: 355–370. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12294.

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.

Meletis, D., & Dürscheid, C. (2022). Writing Systems and Their Use: An Overview of Grapholinguistics. Walter de Gruyter.

Randall, C. (2026). According to plan. Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Smith, B. E. (2017). Composing across modes: A comparative analysis of adolescents’ multimodal composing processes. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(3), 259–278.

Smith, B. E. (2018). Composing for affect, audience, and identity: Toward a multidimensional understanding of adolescents' multimodal composing goals and designs. Written Communication, 35(2), 182–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088317752335

Walker, J. (2025). The secret astronomers. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.