Kelli R. Gill
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
While reflective writing assignments can be an excellent way to have students look back on a past term and ask how their writing has grown, these assignments can also be challenging for both teachers and students. Often these projects come at the end of a term when students may feel the stress of finals, lack of time, or may simply be burnt out. This results in reflective essays which are summaries of their work or written in a way that the student thinks the instructor wants them to write. Shifting to a multimodal assignment can be a helpful way to get out of this rut, because it requires the student to think differently about how they can represent what they’ve learned and approach composing with renewed energy. In this assignment, students compose zines to reflect on their experience in the first-year writing classroom. As a DIY, flexible genre, zines are an ideal assignment for challenging students to make their own decisions as writers and to be inventive with the way they represent their ideas. As noted by Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe, students often respond to multimodal assignments with excitement and find them refreshing and meaningful (4). In my experience, reflecting with zines does just that. In this assignment students are not only tasked with meeting the general goals of a reflective final essay (for example: identifying themes or growths in their writing, reflecting on lessons learned), but are also encouraged to be intentional with their composing choices. Unlike standard text-based essays, zines are more open ended, requiring students to intentionally make their own decisions on length, format, and materials. While this can be challenging, many students have noted that the option to work with physical paper made their work easier and relaxing because it didn’t “feel” like work and gave them a break from screens. Overall, the assignment accomplishes the learning outcomes of a final reflective essay but with new challenges of multimodality.