Within writing pedagogy, multimodal typically refers to composing in genres besides the traditional academic essay. For example, students might be asked to write a feature article for a popular magazine, make regular entries on a class blog, design an advocacy website, develop a poster presentation, or produce a podcast in the style of This American Life.

As an English 100 instructor, you might choose to have students work multimodally during their short assignments while still producing more traditional texts for the major writing projects, or you might choose to have the multimodal assignment serve as the capstone to a portfolio, perhaps with an extended reflective, descriptive or analytical Writer’s Memo. Either way, it is crucial to make your purposes for assigning these kinds of projects clear to your students. By asking students to write a graphic narrative, for example, you aren’t asking them to become master comic book artists so much as you are helping them to identify and navigate the moves involved in working in an unfamiliar genre. The ability to identify generic moves and respond to particular exigencies, alongside an understanding of audience and purpose, are the cornerstones of rhetorical awareness.

Given the English 100 Program’s emphasis on rhetorical awareness in contrast to simplistic notions of textual mastery, multimodal assignments can be an especially effective strategy for moving students away from limited ideas about writing—for example the idea that learning to be a good writer means learning unbreakable rules that always apply. At the same time, these kinds of assignments can help them move toward thinking about context and situation as crucial elements in determining how to write well at any moment. In other words, by asking students to compose multimodally, you can give them the opportunity to observe how different audiences, purposes, or technologies might call for different kinds of responses, voices, genres, or styles.

What Students Can Learn from Multimodal/New Media Assignments

• Metacognitive skills: greater awareness of their writing habits, of their writing choices, and of methods for dealing with unfamiliar forms of writing
• Flexibility: through engagement in less familiar processes of invention, drafting, and revising.
• Critical perspectives: on media, technology, and literacy
• Information literacy
• Rhetorical awareness and performance
• Technological proficiency

General Tips for Multimodal and New Media Teaching

• It’s better to start small, especially if you’re also new to a technology or type of new media you want to bring into the course.
• Make use of campus resources like the STS (Software Training for Students – https://sts.doit.wisc.edu/) and Design Lab (https://designlab.wisc.edu/) to save yourself and your students time, and to make sure that you are helping your students succeed.
• Students may not be as tech-savvy as you expect. Even those that are very tech savvy in one area may have little experience in another common type of new media.
• Models are especially important for multimodal writing. Be aware that students may be so concerned about either the format or the technology that they can easily lose sight of the larger rhetorical or critical concerns.
• Consider using clear genres to make expectations easier to articulate. Many new media forms give writers great flexibility with genre; the same form (e.g. blogs, podcasts, visual essays, web pages) can accommodate many different genres (e.g. satire, talk show, political talking heads). For example, students working with This American Life style podcasts as a genre have a better sense of audience, purpose, and possible rhetorical choices.

Multimodal Assignment Design – Additional Considerations

Goals: What do I want students to do, and how will this assignment help them learn? How do I prioritize learning goals for this assignment? For example, for a new media assignment, am I most interested in teaching specific new media genres, thinking rhetorically about visual or audio composition, critical perspectives on media, informational literacy, technological proficiency, general rhetorical dexterity, or something else?

Remediation: How does the kind of new media/multimodal writing build on – or react against – longstanding types of writing? Will students already be familiar with the antecedents to the new media that they will be working on, and would it be helpful if they were?

Coherence of Teaching: If you want to give students the option to use new media, but you won’t require that they do, make sure the options you provide address similar enough learning outcomes that all your in-class discussions and activities will be useful no matter what options students choose.