Benjamin Djain & Angela Geosits
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
The challenge of providing a multimodal assignment to students is encouraging creativity and experimentation with tools that are unfamiliar while, at the same time, ensuring that their work can be marked to a standard. Having students craft a substantive artist’s statement fulfills this dual remit of recognizing the student’s efforts at using an unfamiliar format while maintaining the learning outcomes of a writing class. One of these learning outcomes encourages students to reflect on their writing, a process that Bourelle et al. see as a natural extension of multimodal writing work: “Much like our belief that multimodal composing provides learning opportunities that stretch rhetorical understanding for students designing multimodal projects, using a variety of modes to mediate students’ reflective practices stretches students’ meaning-making capabilities” (91). The artist’s statement activity asks students to engage in reflection through a sequence of steps. First, students are given the prompt for the multimodal project assignment and are asked to brainstorm ideas to develop in their project as well as possibilities for how they could communicate their ideas through new modes. In this step, students should be encouraged to use both written techniques for generating ideas, such as brainstorming and free writing, and visual techniques, such as sketching and coloring their proposed content and format. By incorporating coloring or sketching during the planning stages of the multimodal process, the abstract nature of multimodal projects becomes more concrete for students. When students have already begun working in multiple modes, it can also be less intimidating to continue developing the multimodal composition. A further benefit of incorporating coloring or sketching in this step is that visual organization begins to develop naturally. The brainstorming step is then followed by a group workshop, where students answer specific questions about what they are trying to achieve with their multimodal project, what challenges they think they’ll face, and why they’re choosing to present their work in their chosen format. Later, after an initial draft is produced, students will return to the same workshop groups and review their work. Finally, students will submit their artist’s statement alongside their multimodal assignment. Being guided through such a detailed process provides students with a great amount of content to reflect on in their final artist’s statement. The key to a good artist’s statement is a student’s reflection on the entire process, from invention to execution that led to the multimodal project it accompanies. This reflective artist’s statement activity is designed to be incorporated alongside any multimodal assignment. The process of drafting the artist’s statement during the planning stage helps students clearly envision their multimodal project. As the multimodal project is completed, the artist’s statement should be revised to reflect the challenges and triumphs of the multimodal composition process. If the artist’s statement is part of the final submission, we recommend that students are not asked to generate extensive new text in the multimodal project, since that would discourage their reflection on the project. This approach is then ideal for more visual or audio driven multimodal assignments that are not text heavy. Another alternative would have students rearrange existing work into a multimodal portfolio, making reflection the focus of the assessment. Finally, we recommend making a multimodal prompt for the assignment. Students appreciate seeing different possibilities for rhetorical communication as part of the classroom experience. An instructor might choose to provide color or images as part of their assignment prompt, to deliver the prompt via video, or even to sketch the prompt on a whiteboard or connected drawing device (such as an iPad or Wacom tablet connected to Zoom).