Remaking Activities
Multimodal Conversion
Often in writing courses we may move quickly from one assignment to another without explicitly helping students make connections between the material and process involved. I recommend a deeper, more lasting engagement with an assignment by taking a writing assignment and then adapting it into several new modes. The adaptation of an assignment (or argument) to different modalities offers students an expanded engagement with the ideas while asking them to retrieve from memory any notions or thoughts that have been previously stored and used during the first assignment. Converting writing to another form (static visual composition, audio, or video, for example) encourages the rethinking of ideas to find new ways of presenting arguments and, simultaneously, further solidifies original concepts to memory while expanding original understandings with new information taken in via a new lens. Researcher Carey Jewitt asked students to "translate between modes" by converting a written assignment into a digital game (76-106). This sort of reworking activity requires students to practice retrieval and strengthen those synaptic connections. As they are strengthening the original synaptic connections, they are simultaneously making new connections, synthesizing information, and reconsolidating. Reflecting on the success of this conversion assignment, Jewitt has found that students learn "from all the modes present on the screen not only from written words and speech" (80) and this sort of adaptation requires "students to deal with different questions and learning demands in the making of the game" (99). We can follow Jewitt's lead in the classroom by asking students to convert an assignment to new forms and reflect upon what they learned in the process. How was the argument represented differently? How did the new mode expand or restrict your ability to communicate your ideas? Extended, but varied, engagement with an assignment can help students more deeply engage in learning and become more conscious of the rhetorical choices they are making in remaking.
Often in writing courses we may move quickly from one assignment to another without explicitly helping students make connections between the material and process involved. I recommend a deeper, more lasting engagement with an assignment by taking a writing assignment and then adapting it into several new modes. The adaptation of an assignment (or argument) to different modalities offers students an expanded engagement with the ideas while asking them to retrieve from memory any notions or thoughts that have been previously stored and used during the first assignment. Converting writing to another form (static visual composition, audio, or video, for example) encourages the rethinking of ideas to find new ways of presenting arguments and, simultaneously, further solidifies original concepts to memory while expanding original understandings with new information taken in via a new lens. Researcher Carey Jewitt asked students to "translate between modes" by converting a written assignment into a digital game (76-106). This sort of reworking activity requires students to practice retrieval and strengthen those synaptic connections. As they are strengthening the original synaptic connections, they are simultaneously making new connections, synthesizing information, and reconsolidating. Reflecting on the success of this conversion assignment, Jewitt has found that students learn "from all the modes present on the screen not only from written words and speech" (80) and this sort of adaptation requires "students to deal with different questions and learning demands in the making of the game" (99). We can follow Jewitt's lead in the classroom by asking students to convert an assignment to new forms and reflect upon what they learned in the process. How was the argument represented differently? How did the new mode expand or restrict your ability to communicate your ideas? Extended, but varied, engagement with an assignment can help students more deeply engage in learning and become more conscious of the rhetorical choices they are making in remaking.