Tag: revision

Tips and Approaches for Multimodal Revision

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By Alycia Gilbert

Note: This post was originally developed for the Winter 2021 CIC Workshop and published to the CIC Blog; however, I thought it was especially relevant now, as students begin their second assignment sequences and instructors begin planning their requirements for the portfolio. Even if your course materials don’t lean too heavily into multimodal composition, this post raises applicable questions and provide tips for scaffolding the revision process for any major project. In resharing this post, I hope that it’s a useful prompt for considering how to define substantive revision for the portfolio, how to prepare students for revision, and how to set reasonable expectations for the revision process considering the scope of the project and the length of the quarter!

Both with my own students and with other instructors, I’ve had a lot of conversations about anxiety when approaching multimodal projects—specifically, anxiety over how to tackle revision. I’ve felt that anxiety myself; developing a philosophy on multimodal revision can be tricky, but it’s an absolute necessity for a portfolio-based writing course. What does substantive revision look like for a multimodal project? What do you emphasize as the end-goal of multimodal revision? And what do you do with multimodal assignments that are difficult to revise within the course’s timeframe?

While everyone’s approach varies with context (and often even by assignment!), here are a few tips for facilitating and framing multimodal revision:

Scaffolding the Revision Process

Assignment sequences that allow you to pace out feedback and the timeline for revision can make the whole process much less daunting, both for you and your students. To scaffold the revision process into your course design, you might…

  1. Consider dividing projects into preliminary drafts

    Preliminary drafts are often easier for students to revise; they’re much more malleable, and students are often more receptive to feedback during the drafting stage. This also helps focus your feedback, which can be geared toward students actualizing their project. You might have shorter assignments that ask students to first create scripts, storyboards, mock-ups, “minimum viable product” drafts, or pitches, depending on the nature of their multimodal project.
  2. Create opportunities for peer review during the drafting process

    Similarly, incorporating peer review into the earlier stages of drafting provides students with concrete insight into how their project is working and where they could make adjustments. These early interventions create a more collaborative class environment and make it easier to resist the urge to backload revision at the end of the course.
  3. Set clear expectations for revision and articulate them before feedback

    Potentially as early as in your syllabus, in your first few class sessions, or within the assignment prompt itself, you might find it helpful to clearly state what goals and expectations the class will have with revision. What does substantial multimodal revision look like for your course? For an assignment? If this is a question that you want your class to negotiate from project to project, what general, core expectations might you let these individual negotiations stem from?
  4. Consider crowd-sourcing assessment criteria with your class

    Not only does this create space for students to more actively and equitably engage with their own assessment, but establishing a communal vocabulary for assessment can make understanding and incorporating feedback easier for students. It can also make peer review more effective, as well. You might begin with the course outcomes and ask students to brainstorm what these outcomes would look like specifically for the assignment, or you might have students assess a past sample together.

Process Over Product

In framing revision, it can be helpful to emphasize gaining and understanding new skills over producing perfect final products—this allows students to experiment with genres they may not feel like they have mastery over and places the focus on growth, student choice, and active use of course outcomes.

  1. Use reflection prompts or revision plans

    These encourage students to demonstrate knowledge of course outcomes and concepts, as well as to explain their rhetorical choices as composers. Revision plans create space for students to explain what they would revise if they had time or were asked to do so; revision plans keep the focus on the process of learning multimodal composition and negotiating feedback with questions of rhetorical effectiveness, while acknowledging the time constraints of the course (“If I had more time to work with this project, I would…”). Additionally, these types of assignments tie in well with the goals of the final portfolio and incorporating metacognition.
  2. Provide multiple opportunities for students to reflect at different stages of the composing process

    Reflecting across a project’s composition helps students break down the creative process and see how feedback, revision, and trial and error shaped their work. Ask students to focus on the effects of their compositional choices and incorporate evidence from their compositions.

Giving Feedback to Multimodal Assignments

Sometimes, anxieties about facilitating multimodal revision are tied to broader anxieties about giving feedback on multimodal projects. In addition to emphasizing process over product, here are a few things that might demystify the feedback process:

  1. Be aware of time management

    Multimodal pieces often take more time to grade, but it’s important to experience the piece in full—the pace at which the audience engages with the material is a rhetorical aspect of the text. You might try to develop systems for responding quickly and effectively to multimodal texts, like taking screenshots or marking areas to return to after your first viewing.
  2. Consider Higher Order Concerns for multimodal feedback

    With multimodal projects, keeping tabs on how much revision you’re guiding students toward can make your feedback more straightforward and their revision process less overwhelming. Like in any other composition classes, use rhetorical principles to guide your comments. With HOC in mind, you might focus feedback on:
    • The composition’s effectiveness in addressing the rhetorical situation
    • Where the composition could better meet the requirements of the assignment or tie to the course’s overall goals and conversations
    • How effectively the composition uses multiple modes symbiotically, rather than considering the modes separately in your feedback. Does the composition combine appropriate modalities effectively to communicate the piece’s purpose? Or do the multiple modes overlap in ineffective, redundant ways or seem extraneous?

An effective, consistent feedback system and scaffolding revision into your course are just a few of the larger approaches that you can take to make multimodal revision a little less intimidating in the composition classroom. Let us know in the comments if you’ve got any tried and true approaches to framing multimodal revision to add to this conversation!

For further reading, check out these sources that helped inform this post:

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11 Resources for Teaching the Portfolio

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The EWP ADs have put together this list of teaching artifacts related to the Portfolio, including presenting the portfolio, understanding outcomes, conferencing prep, writing reflections and other topics. We’ve done our best to add framing and ways for you to think through each material offered. If you want to grab any of these for yourself, please make a copy in Google Docs (File>Make a Copy) and adapt away!

1. Portfolio Skeleton from the CIC

Framing Note: This portfolio skeleton was developed by the CIC a few years ago to give instructors a concrete example of a bare-bones portfolio to share with students. The thought that inspired its creation was that the form of the eportfolio can be tricky, and if we’re asking students to focus more on content and reflection for the portfolio, providing a skeleton can make the process of housing/organizing that information more straightforward. (Alycia Gilbert)

2. Portfolio Workshop Guide: Showcase Piece Reflection + Revision

Framing Note: This worksheet is intended to be used for peer review activity where students work in pairs, reading each other’s showcase piece reflection and revision of their chosen assignments. The questions in the worksheet are intended to check the completion of the portfolio, the writing of the showcase piece reflection, discussion on the outcomes, and the thoroughness of the revision. (Anselma Prihandita)

3. Portfolio Workshop Guide: Welcome Page + Introductory Reflection

Framing Note: This worksheet is intended to be used for peer review activity where students work in pairs, reading each other’s welcome page and introductory reflection for the (Canvas online) portfolio. The questions in the worksheet are intended to check the technicalities of the online portfolio (links, completion of all required elements), the writing of the welcome page and introductory reflection, as well as their contents. (Anselma Prihandita)

4. Conferencing Rubric

Framing Note: This rubric serves both me and the student well to figure out if we got through everything we needed to talk about  in conferences. For portfolios, I have a lesson on the portfolio format and ask them to think through their choices for revision and what outcomes to target before our meeting. (Francesca Colonnese)

5. Portfolio Preparation Worksheet

Framing Note: I ask students to spend a few minutes with this worksheet and bring it with them to conferences (which I usually hold during the first week of the portfolio sequence). This worksheet gets them thinking about the outcomes alongside their written assignments. It doesn’t have to be super detailed, just some preliminary brainstorming that can help us talk through what they plan to do for their portfolio and how they can go about accomplishing that work. (Missy González-Garduño)

6. Peer Review: Circling Sentences to Target an Outcome

Framing Note: A peer review activity in which students work in pairs on a Short Assignment revision. Students underline physical copies of their document and follow steps to generate outcome-specific feedback. (Francesca Colonnese)

7. General Reflection Questions

Framing Note: These reflection questions came up because I felt that sometimes students are too engrossed in the “outcomes” that their reflections ended up just rehashing the language of the outcomes, ticking boxes, being performative. These questions were my attempt to get out of them something more meaningful. Instead of asking them, “Have you fulfilled outcome 1-4 in this assignment?” I asked them to think about the following questions. The result of this reflection can go into the students’ general reflection section in the portfolio. (Anselma Prihandita)

8. Critical Reflections Brainstorming/Annotation Activity

Framing Note: This activity is a helpful way for students to gather evidence or exhibits (however you frame it in your course) of how they’re working with an outcome in their showcase piece. I like that this activity lets students brainstorm content that can be immediately used in their critical reflections, and I also like that it asks students to think about all of the ways their chosen outcome is present before prompting them to get specific and choose the most effective examples–it creates space for them to consider how their portfolio audience will interact with evidence. (Alycia Gilbert)

9. Workshop Guidelines Powerpoint

Framing Note: I use this powerpoint to guide students as they workshop their peers portfolio rough drafts. Students will bring in a rough draft each day of class during the last two weeks and class sessions will be devoted to workshopping those ideas. In the past I’ve done this asynchronously which you can retain or modify if you’d like to do it in person. (Missy González-Garduño)

10. Genre Translation of Outcomes Activity

Framing Note: An activity in which students trace and reflect on their learning through the language of the outcomes by conducting a genre translation of the course outcomes for an incoming English 131 class. (Joe Wilson)

11. Reading Activity and Guiding Questions for Theory of Writing Organized Portfolio 

Framing Note: I assign this text to students because it germinates discussions about transfer, a goal of all writing courses and particularly English 131. This text has them think specifically about writing course assignments, their own engagement in those assignments, the purpose of the class, and their own revising practices. It becomes a launching point for discussing the portfolio that specifically articulates the stakes of revision and reflection in a way that gets considerable buy-in from students: they recognize that the portfolio becomes the site that either secures or maligns their disposition toward transferring learning from this course into future professional/academic/public writing contexts, genres, and modalities. (Joe Wilson)

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