The Use and Evaluation of Multimodal Media in W131ML

Welcome to Multilingual Goes Multimodal. On this site you will find my ideas for how we can maximize the use of multimodal media for the ML curriculum, from how best to frame the integration of multimedia within the context of elementary composition for L2 writers, to suggestions for accommodations in the syllabus for a fuller multimodal experience. Finally, a revision of our "Assessing Multimedia Projects" crib sheet appears at the end and synthesizes many of the ideas enumerated in previous posts.

Though this site focuses largely on the teaching and assessment of visual media in the W131ML classroom, multimodal sources or projects could also include podcasts, blogs, music, and more.

I hope you find this site useful in further developing your ideas for future syllabi.

How Can We Use Multimodal Media to its Fullest in W131ML?

I found that in ML, my students often treated the multimodal elements of instruction as afterthoughts. However, I noted that many of my students were interested in film, advertising, art, and photography, among other such visually-oriented disciplines and hobbies, which made me believe that this particular population would not only benefit a great deal from multimodal education, but also come to value and enjoy lessons in visual analysis. I began to wonder what I could do to frame multimedia sources in a way that would appeal to them both for analytical skills development and for basic appreciation.

While it would require some work with the syllabus, I believe our course has room for some tweaking of the schedule and of the sequence of assignments. I propose the following:

• Introduce the course as one that relies upon multimedia source analysis
• Let students know that this is a prominent feature of the class as a whole, and is not something to ignore in favor of "traditional" essay writing. Working with different and disparate kinds of sources is a part of essay writing.
• Include multimodal texts for each reading
• See Pairing Media with Reading below
• Emphasize the Genre Repurposing assignment 
• Explain throughout the semester that each multimodal source could serve as inspiration for the final Genre Repurposing assignment
• Have students set up a course-specific blog using such platforms as Wordpress, Blogspot, or Tumblr.
• I would like to experiment with student blogs being a course requirement. Students could make once-weekly multimodal posts (either something they've found or something they've created) and write up ~250-word text entries to go along with them. I believe that short, informal -- though still carefully-written -- write-ups of media in subjects they find interesting would encourage and develop L2 writing skills.

Interpreting Visual Media

Students often "narrate" visual media -- analyzing for content and "plot" rather than how composition contributes to meaning. In teaching visual analysis, it is important to emphasize that, like textual media, visual media has both an audience and an author, and it is the author's job to make deliberate aesthetic choices to evoke feeling or convey information. Complex, analysis-worthy visual media does not happen by accident or luck, but by design.

Questions to pose to students in order move them away from storytelling and toward analysis:

• What is the issue being "discussed" here?
• Can you identify the author's stance on this issue? 
• How is the author of this text constructing her argument? 
• Which rhetorical devices or moves does the author employ? 
• What concrete evidence from the visual elements can you use as proof of the author's argument?
• What about messages unintended by the author? Do those count? 
• Can you construct an argument that supports the existence of unintended messages in visual texts? Is there evidence?

Fruitful (and fun!) resources:

• Controversial Dove advertisement
• Argument Clinic - Monty Python sketch
• excerpts from Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi - From Inquiry to Academic Writing page 681
• John McGlothlin's lens claim lesson plan on corn
• Film clip from Food, Inc. ~00:17:30 - 00:19:00
• Ukrainian streetfighting photos comparison
• Vogue photos comparison

Pairing Media with Reading

Something I love about our program is the "do more with less" model of teaching readings. In reading fewer items more closely, our students come to understand the breadth and nuance of each article used in class, and to integrate the information in those articles as steadfast knowledge rather than instantly forgettable flotsam. To me, the act of absorbing information until it becomes intrinsic represents true learning and literacy.

One thing I wish I'd started earlier in the semester would be the pairing of our readings with other media, not only to emphasize the importance of digital literacy and multimodal education, but to deepen students' understanding of portable concepts from readings and to develop their lens claims skills.

Here, I will enumerate media I used or would consider using in the future for each reading. I welcome comments that contain suggestions for other media that may be helpful for each reading.

Ann DuCille, excerpt from Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference

• The Scary Reality of a Real-Life Barbie Doll by Galia Slayen
• Illustrates vividly how a human woman would look (and behave) with Barbie's proportions. 
• How to Look Like a Plastic Barbie tutorial
• On one level a tutorial on make-up products and usage, while on another level, an idictment of the lengths it takes to look "plastic-perfect."
• Photoshop Makeover
• A glimpse into the photo manipulations tools used to erase "flaws" and change how people look.
• The Photoshop Effect & The Photoshop Effect 2
• A look into the fashion industry's reliance on photo manipulation and its direct effect on women's self-esteem and body image.
• Clark black doll/white doll experiments
• Experiments involving black and white baby dolls depicting the deeply-ingrained cultural association people have equating whiteness with goodness and blackness with badness from a very young age.

bell hooks, excerpt from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

• excerpts from What It Is, a graphic novel by Lynda Barry 
• A journey with the author in finding her creativity despite an unhealthy environment  
• photos from integration, AP Images
• Historic photographs from the end of segregation.

Richard Rodriguez, "Scholarship Boy"

• Taking suggestions!

Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue"

• film clip from The Joy Luck Club (1993)
• a short scene rendering a mother/daughter relationship and East/West culture clash.

Deborah Tannen, "There Is No Unmarked Woman"

• Gendered Bathroom Signs 
• Traditional and alternative bathroom signs from all over the world - displays how men get to be people, while women are people wearing dresses/hijabs/wings/etc.

Assessing Multimedia Projects

In looking over our existing crib sheet (by T. Rickert, C. Charlton, K. Agena, and J. Romberger) on the assessment of multimedia projects, I have identified information I consider useful as well as gaps. I will recreate the crib sheet here, with revisions and additions. Because so much of my focus on analysis of multimedia has been in assessing a given item's compositional choices and "argument," I feel that evaluation of any student multimedia project must be based more on its relative success in constructing and supporting an argument/stance/claim than, for example, in the technical aspects of creating a website.

Evaluative criteria are not valuable or applicable in and of themselves. Rather, they are tied to larger contextual concerns about audience, purpose, and presentation, which are all important factors for students to learn to negotiate. In that sense, assessing multimedia projects is not very different from other, more traditional textual assignments students have been completing throughout the semester. However, as books differ from film, our students' essays will diverge from their multimodal projects. As such, the translation of an issue from text to multimedia will require a different set of criteria and expectations.

Common criteria used for evaluating print-based essays:

• clear, original, dynamic thesis/main claim
• organization/coherence
• research and citation of credible, academic sources
• grammar/style/syntax/fluidity

While multimedia and hypertext projects do share some of these criteria, there are some prominent departures as well. These include:

• Non-linearity: taking full advantage of what hypertexts can offer means alternate forms of organization to the straightforward linearity of print-based writing. This doesn't mean that chaos rules, but it does mean many other forms of organization may be appropriate. Different, less immediately obvious forms of coherence and flow may emerge as well.
• Open-endedness: sometimes there is little to no closure in the traditional sense. This not only means that one shouldn't be seeing the importation of the five-paragraph essay, but that hypertexts oftentimes loop back around, link elsewhere, or find other, nebulous ways of ending/re-beginning.
• Style: what is appropriate for formal, print-based texts is not always so for hyper- and web-texts. Rhetoricality is crucial here.
• Pathos over ethos: some projects, particularly those student-created art-/film-/photography-based ones, will often contain more personalized human connection than data-heavy work. In evaluating such work, an instructor must focus on the means by which the student constructs his argument and assess its relative success according to measurable criteria to avoid the appearance of making value judgements on personal content. Such criteria should include, but is not limited to: 
• Is the author's stance on an issue clear? 
• What visual elements does the author employ to craft his argument? 
• Is the argument original and compelling rather than cliche and superficial? 
• What evidence supports the argument? 
• In what way does the project convey both issue and argument? Is it thorough and clear?
• Is the project aesthetically pleasing and professional in appearance? 

Additional Rhetorical Criteria Specifically for Website Design:

• Navigation: is everything linked properly? Is it easy to move around the site from page to page? Are the pages laid out sensibly so that visitors can find things quickly? Do all the buttons work?
• Usability: is everything functional? Is the site time-consuming or quick and easy? Is it mystifying, or does it allow for natural, intuitive interaction? Can it be viewed adequately? (For example, do you have dark blue font against a black background or do you provide contrast?)
• Accessibility: how does an interested audience locate your site? Is it categorized on appropriate search engines? If so, how? Is the document noticable in terms of location, design, an appropriateness? 
• Layout and Design: have you used basic design principles? Is there a sense of aesthetics at work? Do the graphics cohere with the text? Is there a sense of balance and proportion? 
• Color scheme: do the colors complement each other appropriately? Is there enough contrast? Are the aesthetics appropriate and effective?

Heuristic for Goal-Orientated Assessment of Multimedia Projects

While we shouldn't expect every student to compose flawless, publishable work, we can determine work that is more mature or elegant according to how well the student understands her own deliberate, rehtorical construction of it. A fundamental part of successfully assessing multimedia projects lies in their goal-oriented construction. It is imperative to develop assignment foals that clearly prioritize and hierarchize the key concepts to be taught in the class as well as determine the size of the role that technology wil play in an assignment's execution. Then, we can draw from that set of goals to articulate our assessment criteria in a way that makes sense to both instructor and students. 

• Course context: What are the official course description and goals as defined by the program? How will this assignment fit into that description and those goals?
• Technological literacy: At what levels of technological literacy are most of your students? How much variance is there? What kind of technological know-how is necessary for their projects, which may differ from student to student? What technologies are available to students outside class time? What kind of previous experience do they have with those technologies?

Repurposed Genre Assignment

If the Repurposed Genre assignment remains the only truly multimodal project in W131ML, it may be useful to develop an assignment sheet for it separately from the Critical Argument assignment sheet. Such a sheet should emphasize the translation of an issue and argument into a multimodal genre such as photo essay, video blog, short film, graphic novel, brochure, letters/manifestos, podcasts, music, painting, diorama, or others. Instructors should develop course-specific evaluative criteria based on those guidelines enumerated above combined with the context of their own classes. Likewise, instructors should develop rubrics for evaluation and response that make sense within the defined strictures of their classes. Because this assignment may bring instructors a diverse array of genres, the rubric must be flexible enough to accommodate various kinds of projects rather than only one, such as a website. Instructors may even consider devising multiple rubrics -- for example, one for genres which are still largely print projects, another for visual projects, another for audio projects, and so on as needed. A sample rubric, fashioned after the 2011-2012 W131 Assistant Directors' rubrics, might look like this:

Criteria for Evaluation	Strong	Satisfactory	Needs Improvement
Content is original and compelling.  Articulates and examines a particular perspective of a nuanced, non-cliché issue.
Uses the chosen genre’s conventions to construct a clear, articulate argument.
Identifies and “markets” to a particular audience most likely to benefit from specific genre choice
Care taken with design. Project is clean, professional-looking, and aesthetically pleasing.
Exhibits completeness and organizational coherence.