Objects, Spaces, Bodies

These lessons and assignments draw upon concepts from visual rhetoric to help students become aware of the objects, spaces, and bodies that both help and hinder their writing processes. Through in-class activities and journaling, students be able to identify the elements of their environments that are especially conducive to the writing process. 

Using Mood Boards to Discuss and Analyze Voice

Because of its impressionistic, hard-to-pin-down character, discussing and analyzing voice presents challenges in the composition classroom. Mood boards, which utilize images, color, and texture, offer a nonverbal, nonlinear way of representing voice.

from Apartment Therapy

This exercise proposes using mood boards as a way to introduce discussions of voice, both in published texts and in students' own writing.This post presents two options for using mood boards to discuss voice in published work and in student drafts, though you could certainly modify any of these ideas in a number of ways to make them suit your classroom and your students.

Video, Collage, and Narrative

Lesson Context

I developed the idea to utilize digital narratives and collages in combination with a unit on personal narrative, after witnessing the trouble that many of the students in my English-100 Introduction to College Composition class faced when beginning to write in this genre. The first sequence of our English-100 curriculum is largely dedicated to writing in personal narrative, and I found that it was a skill many of the students lacked after four years spent writing five paragraph essays in high school. Many of my students faced difficulty in coming up with ideas for personal narratives and even more difficultly using descriptive, metaphorical language to make those narratives come alive.

I knew that it was essential to try and jump-start my students’ creative side and reconnect them to a more imagistic, layered, emotive narrative in order to help them better “show” and not just “tell” their narratives. I tried a number of different approaches, but one central gap or deficiency in my approach upon reflecting back, is that I did not draw enough upon visual modes and experiences to help them begin to “show” through their own words and language. It seems obvious now, but I missed incorporating these strategies into my classroom while teaching this previously. I needed to attend to the ‘visual-verbal’ skills my students already possessed in order to get them to explore and connect with this in their narratives. Through this process I also discovered the many ways digital narratives can be applied to other forms of writing as well, and I offer adaptations to address this issue at the end of my lesson sequence.

Connecting this back to our larger progress and framework, I hope to bring Shipka's understanding of composition and multimodality into my classroom as a means to ‘broaden’ and ‘cultivate’ the notions of meaning and composing that my students have. While working on my masters I had the opportunity to compose a digital narrative as an aesthetic response to The Sound and the Furry in addition to writing a critical literary essay, and this experience solidified the potential of visual strategies, collage, and narrative as a thoughtful means of critique and expression - at the end of these lesson ideas, I offer adaptations, so that this general idea can be applied to a number of different writing prompts, and as a means to explore a wind range of rhetorical devices. I hope to offer this same experience to my students through this series of activities and I hope to present this in a way that is useful to you as instructors.