Thanks, Zac!
In light of Saturday’s focus on multimodal assignments (and the new learning outcomes), I wanted to pass along the link to an e-journal called Currents in Electronic Literacy, which is published by the University of Texas at Austin: http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/. The current issue is dedicated to multimodal literacy and pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on sound and text.
The specific article that I was thinking about on Saturday is called “Remixing the Personal Narrative Essay,” and I think it’s relevant for those who are interested in teaching the literacy narrative as a multimodal piece and keeping it in 103: http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/2011/remixingthepersonalnarrative. The article details how a personal narrative essay was remixed as a multimodal assignment, and it includes the assignment prompt and the final product as well.
Although most of us won’t be able to visit a recording studio with our students, there are a number of ways to replicate this type of assignment with the resources available at DePaul. In general, I thought it was just a nice example of outside-the-box thinking for those of us who are interested in revamping the literacy narrative to make sure that it’s complex enough to warrant inclusion in 103.
From the article’s opening paragraph:
Is the English classroom ready to go multimodal? As Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis point out, the changing social and technological landscape has led to “meaning [being] made in ways that are increasingly multimodal—in which written-linguistic modes of meaning are part and parcel of visual, audio, and spatial patterns of meaning” (5). According to a recent report sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, “more than one-half of all teens have created media content” (Jenkins 3), suggesting that students are more than ready for the English classroom to go multimodal. Perhaps a better question is: Where to begin?