Instructor: Megan Dennis
Parts One & Two due Thursday, May 7!
This project comes in two parts:
Part One – The Multimodal Advocacy Project
This unit, we will explore multimodal texts and digital platforms as ways to advocate for relevant causes. Building from our investigations into human rights issues and questions of identity in our previous units, this project allows you to insert yourselves into a pertinent conversation and push for change. After looking at multiple issues over the course of our semester, from local to systemic issues, in this unit you can express activism within your chosen area.
This assignment asks you to imagine, design, compose, and share—that is, to make your own multimodal text or digital project in the form of advocacy. Options to consider (and feel free to introduce others):
• a basic webpage/blog
• a YouTube video
• a photographic essay
• a series of memes
• a comic strip
• a podcast
• a work of art
• a digital timeline or other interactive space such as Story Maps
Although your modes may take many forms, there are a few basic essentials:
1) Overall Purpose: While there will be aesthetic qualities to your multimodal project, your first purpose is to find a group/cause you wish to advocate for—and think about how to persuade your audience to do something. Are you advocating for increased awareness/education? Donation? To gain additional activists to your organization? Whatever your cause, think carefully about your audience and how you can best communicate with them. In conversation with me, you will decide upon a project that fits our outlined criteria for a cause or issue.
Your cause should fit under one of these overall umbrellas: human, animal, or environmental rights.
We will discuss examples within this unit to help you find a topic that interests you.
2) Multiple Modes: Because your projects are multimodal, they must, by definition, include two or more modes of representation (e.g., visual and sound; alphabetic text and image; gesture or movement and sound; etc.)
Part Two – The Explication
Along with your multimodal project, you will submit an accompanying written text of 3-4 pages, in which you explain and reflect upon your choices in design and your final product. These questions—drawn from :
Overall Goal:
What is it, exactly, I want to say? What am I trying to accomplish—above and beyond the basic requirements of the assignment? Or put differently: What purpose does my project fulfill? What do I want it to do? Or what might it do? For whom? In what contexts?
How I Accomplished that Goal:
What choices did I make on behalf of the goal(s) of my project? More specific than that, what rhetorical, material, technological, stylistic, and of course, modal choices did I make? Who is my intended audience, and how did that shape the decisions I made?
How am I employing rhetorical appeals to complete my purpose successfully? (Pathos, ethos, logos, etc.)
Why did I choose this approach over others? What did my plan enable (or afford) me to do that those other plans and approaches would not?
What stylistic choices did I make in service to my purposes, that is, to accomplishing what I want my project set out to do? Were there any choices I may not have consciously made, but were, in a sense, made for me by my particular choice of approach, materials, technologies?