Multilingual and multimodal composition at school: ScribJab in action

In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of ScribJab, a multilingual iPad application and website (ScribJab.com), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from ethnographic observations in two schools, we recount how students and teachers took up ScribJab and illustrate how the tool's design was linked with and contradicted teachers' and schools' stated and enacted language policies, ideas about assessment, and understandings of multimodality. We conclude by arguing that the ecology of the classrooms was materially altered by ScribJab and further changes are required to make multilingual pedagogies, multimodal composition, and their assessment more commonplace in schools. We propose that future work on multilingual and multimodal education may need to consider more than the human aspects of classroom life.