Welcome to the fourth and final post in our Hack and Yack series on multimodal composition from Amy Braziller and Elizabeth Kleinfeld. Already, we’ve learned about the myths of multimodal composing, creating multimodal assignments, and assessing multimodal work. Read on to hear more about how you can bring digital stories into your writing class. *** If you are looking for an assignment to integrate into your writing class to “try on” a multimodal approach, you might consider a digital story. This assignment uses narrative as its base and helps students combine digital images, recorded narration, video clips, text, and/or music. Just as…
Author: Elizabeth Kleinfeld
Amy Braziller, Elizabeth Kleinfeld
I teach rhetoric and writing theory and practice courses in the English department and direct the Writing Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Before joining the MSU Denver faculty in 2008, I taught at Red Rocks Community College for thirteen years. You can learn more about me here: http://elizabethkleinfeld.com/.
Welcome to the third post in our Hack and Yack series on multimodal composition from Amy Braziller and Elizabeth Kleinfeld. Enjoy! *** You’re excited about assigning a multimodal project. You’ve crafted the assignment, but then you stop, fearful, wondering how are you supposed to grade the project. It’s not an essay, something you’ve been grading for years. If you’re not an expert on the genre your student composed in, how can you evaluate it in a fair and ethical way? Furthermore, how can you grade in a way that doesn’t privilege someone who is a video-editing whiz and penalize someone who…
Introducing the second post in our Hack and Yack series on multimodal composition from Amy Braziller and Elizabeth Kleinfeld. Enjoy! *** So you’ve committed to a multimodal approach. You’re trying to figure out how to modify your traditional writing assignments to include genre and mode options. Our first piece of advice is to stop right there. Stop. Avoid the temptation to retrofit traditional assignments to accommodate a multimodal approach. Retrofitting existing assignments may be efficient, but it allows you to bypass the important thinking you need to do to create purposeful and well-crafted multimodal assignments. Consider a typical first-year-writing assignment: Write an…
We’re thrilled to announce our latest Hack and Yack Series. Over the next four weeks, Amy Braziller and Elizabeth Kleinfeld, authors of The Bedford Book of Genres, will be sharing with us an extended look at multimodal composition. Whether you’ve been teaching multimodal composing for a while or you’re not sure where to begin, be sure to tune in Thursdays in September. Amy and Elizabeth have something for everyone. They will share the myths of multimodal composition, considerations for “going multimodal,” anecdotes from their own classrooms, and lots of strategies to help us all become more mindful of our writing…