Hi.
I am a writer, musician, dog-mom, hiker, MFA recipient, and current faculty member of Vermont State University
I am a writer, musician, dog-mom, hiker, MFA recipient, and current faculty member of Vermont State University
Students will be asked to revisit a text they wrote at the beginning of a semester-long course. Their ‘This I Believe' statements were used as a get-to-know-you classroom community-building exercise and informed (ideally) their ideas for the first major writing assignment, the personal essay. Now students will use their statements to create a multimodal piece of art in order to understand new modes of communicating using various media.
The class will view a video, “Gender” by Violet Gallo and use a clip chosen ahead of time by the teacher to analyze modes, or layers in the video. After going through the exercise as a class, students will break up into 2-3 groups to find their own video clips from the same video to “de-layer” and then share their findings and thoughts with the class.
Students will look at a multimodal essay to discuss thesis statements and research questions. The first multimodal essay was written by a student at Georgia State University which uses images, and video to enhance the essay. This lesson is discussion-based and its purposes are as follows:
Reiterate the importance of a thesis statement: what it is, where it occurs in a piece of writing, and how it functions to give a multimodal composition a purpose.
Consider research questions used by the authors of example compositions.
Illustrate the connection between developed research questions, and a thesis statement.
This lesson will put students in the role of assessor. Using multimodal compositions that students have already read, and engaged with (two from class activities, a third was assigned for reading homework for this class), students will use the same rubric for their multimodal essay to assess published multimodal compositions.
The purpose of this lesson is to provide clarity around the evaluation expectations for the assignment. As noted in the unit overview, this can improve the quality of student work by giving students experience with assessment before finishing a project that will be assessed by the same measures. This lesson also boosts student motivation: as cited in research, “competence” is a key component in generating student motivation. This lesson will equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to complete the multimodal essay successfully.
The MLA game is a timed contest between students with different MLA formatted writing. Half of the students have a correctly formatted and cited essay excerpt, the other have an incorrectly formatted and cited excerpt (“a list of links”). These are in printed format, so they are not digital–because then a list of links would seem productive. Students may use their computers for this game but they will have to type in each character of a URL.
The purpose of this lesson is to illustrate the necessity of a system that formats citations and source material. It should be obvious to the class that those with proper MLA citation and formatted excerpts can engage with the written work more easily, quickly and intelligently than those without. Students will see the purpose of the tedious MLA formatting that they are required to fulfill for the Bibliography, first and final drafts of their multimodal essay.