Multimodal Resources

Three SCU English Instructors –Kristin Conard, Maria Judnick, and Robin Tremblay-McGaw—spent the school years 2017-2019 researching the multimodal projects offered in their department and the university as a whole.

We built this page as a gateway to basic information about multimodal projects for faculty and students. The site includes examples of assignments from SCU instructors, rubrics, sample student work, including award-winning projects.

Using text in combination with visual and/or auditory tools, Multimodal Projects enable us to craft compelling and engaging arguments, meditations, essays, critical analyses, research projects, and more. They may take the form of brochures, e-Portfolios, blogs, websites, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc. Multimodal projects challenge students to consider real world audiences and the larger rhetorical contexts in which communication occurs.

There are a number of books and articles addressing multimodal projects in university settings; increasingly colleges and universities are adopting multimodal assignments. For example, the University of Mississippi’s Department of Writing Rhetoric provides a guide to these projects and relevant resources, as does Kettering College; the University of Texas at Austin has a Digital Writing and Research Lab. Washington State University hosted an 8-week long seminar series for its Writing Program faculty on exploring multimodal assignments and assessments.

Increasingly, even small liberal arts colleges, such as Bard College in New York, are developing multimodal modules, such as Bard’s Language & Thinking with Code. Here in the Silicon Valley, San Jose State University requires each freshman Stretch English student to complete at least one multimodal project per year while Stanford created the Program in Writing & Rhetoric and its Transformative Technologies Learning Lab.

Washington State University's webpage asserts: "Research shows that learning, comprehension, and retention of knowledge—cognition—is boosted, even dramatically, by expanding the toolbox to include visual, verbal, and auditory stimuli through multimodal teaching tools."