Multimodal Mondays: Feedback Please!

andrea_lunsford
1 0 779

Two years ago, I began the Multimodal Mondays series on this blog as a way of suggesting practical classroom activities and course assignments that engage the many tools and strategies available for multimodal writing. One of the most exciting things about the series is the guest bloggers, who are doing fascinating work and contributing wonderful multimodal compositions from their students. Well done!

Multimodal Mondays is meant to be activity-driven: an in-class activity and/or homework assignment (with opportunities/questions for student reflection) that you can easily grab and incorporate into your lesson plan or use to develop into a longer assignment down the road. Here is our basic format:

  • A clear learning objective applicable to a general writing or composition course
  • The assignment idea
  • Any specific instructions for students necessary to complete the assignment
  • Any specific in-class guidelines for instructors; these may include examples and/or questions for discussion
  • Examples of student work (provided the student has granted permission to share the work and the institution allows instructors to do so)

As we move into our third year of the series, I want to know: Are you using the activities and assignments suggested? Should the guest bloggers and I present our methods differently? What would you like to see more of?

Please write in and let me know what works and what you suggest for improvement. One easy way to share your thoughts is to Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to comment directly on this post, or take this quick survey.

About the Author
Andrea A. Lunsford is the former director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English. A past chair of CCCC, she has won the major publication awards in both the CCCC and MLA. For Bedford/St. Martin's, she is the author of The St. Martin's Handbook, The Everyday Writer and EasyWriter; The Presence of Others and Everything's an Argument with John Ruszkiewicz; and Everything's an Argument with Readings with John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters. She has never met a student she didn’t like—and she is excited about the possibilities for writers in the “literacy revolution” brought about by today’s technology. In addition to Andrea’s regular blog posts inspired by her teaching, reading, and traveling, her “Multimodal Mondays” posts offer ideas for introducing low-stakes multimodal assignments to the composition classroom.