First, those who prepare English educators must adjust their own definitions of literacy and what it means to be literate in the 21 st Century. Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cindy Selfe (2004, p. xiii) in Picturing Texts write that "Expectations about what it means to be literate have changed.   Students today must be able to read and compose not only conventional print essays but also texts that combine words with images and other graphics . . ." With that in mind, pre-service English teachers cannot be expected to carry such attitudes into their secondary classrooms unless these same attitudes have been discussed, expressed, and ultimately implemented into college classrooms. To that point, Faigley, George, Palchik and Selfe (2004, p. xii) explain "The challenge for college writing teachers is to expand our concept of writing to include the visual as well as verbal texts."  

When applied to this particular argument, pre-service English teachers cannot be expected to adequately incorporate multimodal assignments into their future classrooms if they, themselves, have not been required to complete like assignments as part of their own education. Thus, the preparation of English teachers should include the fostering of these students' abilities "to work with images and to design what [they] write", since a fresh view of composition includes the notion that "we need to compose more than just words and sentences" (Faigley, George, Palchik, & Selfe, 2004, p. 17). The theoretical grounding that informs this expanded definition of composition must be included in the pre-service teacher's preparation, too, since the likelihood exists that many of these novice teachers will meet with resistance when they attempt to incorporate multimodal assignments either into their student-teaching lessons or into their first-year English classrooms.  

William Costanzo (2008, p. 46), in The Writer's Eye: Composition in the Multimedia Age, explains that all writing "is a form of composing." He calls it a "way to organize your thoughts and feelings through the medium of language so that other may be informed, inspired, and moved" (Costanzo, 2008, p. 46); as a result, the power of the written word may be equated with movies, dance, and other artistic forms that have the ability to "inspire" or to "move" an audience. When multimodal pedagogies are employed in a composition classroom, then, the composing element still exists, it just takes on a fresh perspective. Costanzo (2008, p. 46) writes: "Composing in any medium--whether it is writing, filmmaking, choreography, painting, dressmaking, or Web design--involves certain common steps or phases of development. This is because composing is a way of thinking . . ." Thus, multimodal composing is exactly what it claims to be--composition with multimodal elements, yet composition all the same.