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Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn, a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition
Although we can do a lot to teach writing, most of us know that it is ultimately through habitual practice that students become better writers. We can structure activities that make our classrooms more conducive for learning, but it is the act of writing itself that promotes experienced learning. This kind of ritualized practice is the same for multimodal and visual storytelling.
I use visuals and images in my classes in many ways: I have students include them in their compositions as visual rhetoric, use them for invention activities, and to teach rhetorical analysis. I have students tell stories with and through images, text, sound, motion and incorporate them in many other multimodal texts and projects. While I promote visual activities throughout my classes, the semester-long Image-A-Day Challenge engages students in the ritualistic habits of visual storytellers along with metacognitive activities through active reflection.
There are many other similar “challenges” of this sort that involve participants in ritualistic creativity. For example, Project 365 challenges participants to take a photo every day for a year, Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) encourages writers to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days, or Inktober, where every October artists all over the world take on the drawing challenge by doing one ink drawing a day the entire month. Famous artists such as Monet and Van Gogh valued ritualistic creativity and craft through painting and repainting the same haystacks (and other subjects) to extend their skills and better understand the shifting details one learns through practice and reflection.
This multimodal assignment is simple to integrate into any classroom structure and operates in the background along with other assignments in a class. I ask students to participate in the “Image-a-Day” Project in which they capture an original image every day of the semester. Students must compose the images themselves rather than pulling them off the internet or from other sources. This daily image work keeps them focused on the in the present and the reflective activities (on at midterm and final) asks them to look back and make meaning across the whole collection through connections and patterns. The images can stand on their own or can present as associated sequences. Ultimately, the images should engage their audience and tell their stories for the required period of time – the semester.
Here, I've included a digital slideshow of the kind students produce, displaying representative images from my own Image-a-Day project:
At first, students complain about having to complete the assignment every day but they lean into it, as it becomes a habit. I include a daily reminder on their weekly schedule to keep them on task. They enjoy sharing their stories with others and learn about curation and selection as they compose and categorize their images. Like most reflective writing, they come to understand the connections between things that they might not have otherwise noticed. They also leave the class with a tangible catalog of a particular time in their lives – a virtual, multimodal slice of life.
Video Images by Kim Haimes-Korn
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