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Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam (see end of post for bio).
Every fall, I’m struck by the growing age difference between my students and me—things like Snapchat go right over my head, while my in-class references to Dana Carvey portraying Ross Perot on SNL fall on deaf ears. Like my students, though, I’ve embraced the new normal of streaming and downloading music instead of purchasing it or recording it on cassette from the radio. Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud, and the like provide a great deal of convenience and variety; accessing and playing music nowadays is an unquestionable improvement.
I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic, though—mix tapes, the actual cassettes that were carefully planned, curated, recorded, rewound, and labeled, were a huge part of my childhood and they held a great deal of meaning for both the creators and the receivers. Each one was carefully crafted for a particular purpose, to tell a particular story, or to communicate a particular message to the audience. When we create playlists now, we don’t spend the same time or effort thinking about the stories behind them; in that respect, the mix tape had unparalleled narrative and rhetorical potential, and this assignment pays homage to that.
Objective
This assignment, which asks respondents to create a custom playlist in order to communicate a narrative or emotional arc to their audience, challenges students to use song selection and arrangement as narrative devices in response to a traditional writing prompt. The goals of the assignment are to identify musical elements and their rhetorical effects and to apply that knowledge in creating a multimodal storytelling text.
Background Reading
Assignment
Reflection
This project provides many opportunities for customization for specific courses, syllabi, and learning outcomes. For example, some instructors might require students to present their playlists in class, while others might ask students to use the “Share” function to facilitate a type of peer review. In any iteration of the project, students investigate the commonalities between textual composition and musical composition, and they get to use their personal musical aesthetic and experiences in order to do so.
Guest bloggerAmanda Gaddam is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies.
Want to be a guest blogger on Multimodal Mondays? Message Leah Rang for more information.
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