Charles McGregor
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
This assignment is intended to be used as a proposal for a big multimodal composition project. The goal of this assignment is to help students articulate their topic, think through their intended audience and where they exist, and practice composing through a non-linguistic mode of communication they will be using for their bigger project. You could use this proposal in preparation for a multimodal narrative, a multimodal research text, or any other assignment that requires students to utilize divergent modes of communication within a writing class. In preparation for this assignment, students should read, watch, or view something that gives them a good understanding of what multimodal means and what the multimodal composing process looks like. Within this assignment description, I utilize Melanie Gagich’s An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing since she speaks directly to students about what this process looks like in a typical college writing classroom. Within the Gagich reading, I ask students to have a good understanding of the fives modes of communication that she references (linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural) (67). You may also want to teach a question-of-inquiry lesson if they are doing a research-heavy multimodal writing assignment. When they have a solid idea about their topic and what multimodal composing entails, then they are ready for their proposal. As previously stated, I ask students to use the primary mode of communication they will be utilizing for their project. For example, if spatial ends up being their primary mode, they may repurpose a boardgame and its various pieces to communicate an idea. A group of two students did this for their proposal in one of my classes as they submitted a picture of a Scrabble board with a mix of Spanish and English words spelling out their project details. They used the space of the board to communicate their proposal and invoke the spatial layout of a Scrabble game. This proposal served as a precursor to their final multimodal project where they created an original boardgame that debated the merits of two-way immersion vs. immersion ESL instruction. The goal of the proposal is to get students to think through their topic, the audience they want to engage, and practicing the mode they want to use to engage that audience. Do not assess students too harshly on how polished the primary mode they use looks, feels, or sounds since this is intended to be a practice run at using that mode for their bigger project.