Tania de Sostoa-McCue
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
This assignment is intended to be a transition, preparing students for practice in moving from alphabetic to multimodal projects. The goal of this assignment is for students to take a familiar genre (in this case, post-project reflections) and practice how they might transform an alphabetic assignment into a multimodal deliverable. The zine assignment carries a low point value and is not traditionally graded, a practice that creates a lower-stakes space for experimentation and productive failure. Over the course of the semester, students have written one-to-two page reflection papers that require them to consider the process and product of their work. Tasking students with reimagining a familiar genre asks them to continue a course goal practicing generative discomfort and productive failure. Articulated by Boler, a pedagogy of discomfort functions in differing ways, including opening avenues for “invitation to inquiry” (176). Students who have become familiar with the genre being adapted have come to understand how to give the “right” answers. There are no “right” answers in this project–rather students must discern what message most matters, and what compositional choices might help deliver the message in a new format. This zine assignment functions in multiple ways, fulfilling a few key purposes. Transitioning students from a semester of alphabetic-only composition into multimodal composition opens avenues to consider differing strategies, the power of rhetorical choice, and the relationship between purpose and audience. Multi-modality in the composition classroom asks students to draw on multiple semiotic modes, a practice advocated for by scholars in the field of composition (Luther, Prins and Farmer). The zine assignment begins the process of asking students to utilize different semiotic modes by having them practice adding one new mode–the visual. Larger multimodal projects that follow will ask students to practice additional modes for a higher point value. The zine assignment is structured to create a safe space for students to begin to experiment and familiarize themselves with differing forms of composition in preparation for these larger projects.