Alongside more traditional writing assignments, students in my literature, media, and writing courses create a variety of multimodal projects, including comics, podcasts, Twine games, videos, and zines. A small selection of student projects have been digitally published, and these samples can be viewed at the links below.
Recess Media Podcasts and Videos
Click here to view the student projects.
Multimodal Writing / Digital Literacy is an undergraduate course offered by the University of Florida Department of English that teaches students to compose and circulate multimodal documents in order to convey creative, well- researched, carefully crafted, and attentively written information through digital platforms and multimodal documents. This course promotes digital writing and research as central to academic, civic, and personal expression.
During Fall 2020, students in my Multimodal Writing class created a series of podcast episodes and videos that analyze artifacts of children’s media (literature, film, television, video games, toys, etc.). Covering a broad range of topics, including Gothic children’s books, the animated series Courage the Cowardly Dog, and The Lorax, the projects seek to answer two important questions: Why are these artifacts meaningful for children and American culture at large, and how do these texts reflect and critique mainstream ideologies?
ImageTexT Projects
In Spring 2021, students in my upper division Envisioning Environmental Disaster in Children’s Literature course carefully analyzed how the relationship between images and text in comics, illustrated novels, picturebooks, and other media allows creators to convey environmental messages to young readers. We devoted particular attention to two central questions: 1) how can the structural components of these imagetexts (such as color, the gutter, and panel size) represent abstract and frightening environmental issues in a way that young children can comprehend? and 2) how can imagetexts and their paratexts empower children to participate in environmental activism? For this Creative Imagetext Project assignment, students built on the imagetext principles we examined in class by creating their own comic, picturebook, or zine about the environmental issue of their choice. All the imagetexts feature informational paratexts, such as lists of additional resources and suggestions for ways that readers can participate in environmental activism. Significantly, the students each created their imagetexts digitally using free software. Their creations demonstrate that anyone can use comics and picturebooks to advocate for the issues that they care about.
Three of these projects were published in the journal ImageText: