VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: MULTIMODAL ASSIGNMENTS AS EQUITY-BASED INSTRUCTION

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In this video presentation by Marina DelVecchio, English Instructor at Durham Technical Community 
College, you'll learn how providing low-stakes multimodal assignments can help improve equity in 
your online courses.

Video created by the CALA Online Equity Project in partnership with Instructional Technologies.

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[Marina]
Hi, everyone. 

This is Marina chiming in on multimodal assignments and how they can be used for equity-based 
instruction, which adds to student engagement, as well as equity. 

So multimodal assignments are just assignments in which you can give your students options with 
which to submit into discussion forums posts -- or at least that's how I used it.

So instead of asking students -- in discussion forums -- to type information in their responses or 
examine case studies or respond to a reading, they could submit multimodally, which means they 
could choose to write it out, type it up, or they could use video, or audio or podcast, or a 
PowerPoint presentation, and so forth. 

So we're giving students choices, and in giving students choices in how they're submitting their 
work, this contributes to their agency as well as to their self-efficacy. 

Every student has a different learning style. We talk about, we talk a lot about how to teach, 
appealing to every single student's learning style. In addition, we can also consider how we're 
allowing students to submit their assignments to us because not everybody writes well or not 
everybody can express themselves in writing as well as they can verbally, let's say.

Multimodal assignments are equitable in that they also allow weaker or more inexperienced writers 
the opportunity to shine through creativity and uniqueness, as well as the modes that work best 
for them to express themselves, and this is really important when it comes to equity. 

These are the different multimodal texts you could give your students as options: 

You have alphabetic text, which is the traditional way of writing, typing up stuff in Word, 
whatever. 

You have videos, you have audio, you have PowerPoint and other creative modes that exist out 
there. There are drawings of poems, songs, rap, comics, memes, posters, and podcasts. There are 
actually a lot of articles about how faculty are using podcasts in their composition classrooms or 
history classrooms and math classrooms.

So if you think this is like a big deal, and you have to teach students technology, that's not 
true at all. I don't teach my students technology. I teach them writing and literature [laughs] 
and women's studies. 

All I do is I post this announcement in my orientation folder, and I let them know that they can 
submit -- to their low-stakes assignments -- through multimodal options. They cannot submit it for 
Paper 1, 2, 3, and the annotative bibliography. Those are still submitted through the traditional 
means of text or writing out alphabetic texts.

But I tell them, like, I am a writer, so I like writing things out. That's more comfortable for 
me, as you can tell from my video presentation. But other students can present their ideas in a 
better way through a different mode.

They could do graphic novels, story books, podcasts, and as you can see, this is it, this is the 
announcement that I give them, and I give them links if they want to figure out, like, how to do 
something. I also provide them links with how to upload videos to YouTube, and Zoom, and 
Screencastify, but that's about as far as I go. Everything else is up to them, it's their choice. 

So I have one example that I'm bringing to you. The students are given 12 questions related to 
reading Nella Larsen's "Passing", which is a novel in my American literature class, and they have 
to choose one of those questions. 

So these three students are all choosing different questions. This is Emily, and she's just doing 
a picture of herself with audio. 

[Emily, Durham Tech student]

There is a scene in part one where Clare Kendrey invites two childhood friends, Irene and 
Gertrude, to tea. Through them together represent the spectrum of which African-American people 
sometimes take part in passing. And their views on... 

[Marina]

That's just her reading out from her notes, so she did actually have to write out her stuff, and 
she's reading it, and she's very expressive in her reading. So that's one choice that she opted 
for. 

And this is Gavin. 

[Gavin, Durham Tech student]

I just responded to prompt 11, which is: 

'What is the significance of the open ending in "Passing"? Why does Larson choose to include such 
an ending, and why does she refuse to clarify the identity of the murderer?'

"Passing", as I'm sure everyone can agree, leaves the readers on an ending that might surprise, 
confuse, and provide questions with no answer. Irene's lack of clear recollection of this scene 
leaves the murderer clean off the hook, at least in the reader... 

[Marina]

So that's Gavin, and then this is my favorite, and try and guess why it's my favorite!

[Valerie, Durham Tech student. As Valerie speaks, pen-drawn silhouette sketches appear depicting 
scenes from the novel appear.]

Irene married for security, her sons, and financial stability. Both things men were supposed to 
provide as breadwinners of the household. She was to him, only a mother of his sons. They had 
separate bedrooms and while they had children, they were to each other, co-parents, not sexual 
partners. 

Both Clare and Irene married their partners for a higher status within society. Claire's husband, 
John, being a white, racist, wealthy man, and Irene's husband, being a black doctor. A difference 
with this is....

[Marina]

So this is a great example of equity and how it kinda plays out with multimodal assignments. 

Emily and Gavin are stellar writers, they're -- all three -- are high-school students, by the way. 
Emily and Gavin are high school stu-- they're all high-school students. Evan and Gavin -- Emily 
and Gavin, so sorry -- are stellar students. And their writing is all 'A' cog-based, right, their 
analysis is amazing and whatever their background is with their education, they have the skills to 
commit to college-level writing. 

Valerie, here, I've had Valerie in two different courses. This, 232, as well as my women's studies 
class, currently. And her writing is not that great. Usually she ends up with like C grades if she 
submits writing, because of the grammar, because of syntax, because of awkward phrasing, because 
of fragments, et cetera. However, she is a very brilliant student.

And when you get her on video or audio, and she is talking about her ideas and relating to the 
literature that she's reading, she is a powerhouse. 

And this is one of my favorite examples for multimodal assignments and how they work in equity 
because her background with writing is not very good. However, she's immensely creative, she's 
very passionate, and she's brilliant. 

So these multimodal assignments kind of work for her in a varied way because she can show through 
her creativity -- as well as not just not doing the writing, but also through her verbal responses 
-- that she is reading, that she is understanding the material, that she is showing her mastery of 
the content in the course, but through a different mode that works best for her. 

Some student testimonials -- I'm not going to read all of them -- but this one says that he gets 
bored of always doing assignments in written form, which is a very common response that I've 
gotten from my students.

Just like we get bored and inundated with reading written material, they get bored being forced to 
write in the same way all the time. 

Another student kind of said the same thing, writing out the assignment is typically the only 
accepted format. And isn't that an interesting factor? Because, technologically, we are so beyond 
that, and the fact that we still rely so heavily on written format is kind of detrimental to many 
of our students. 

And this one says that she likes to -- she prefers -- to write it out her ideas, but she also 
enjoyed the multimodal options because she was able to show off her personality a little bit. And 
it had her get to know her classmates a little better. So I think that, that's kind of like where 
class 'pure engagement' comes in. 

Addressing naysayers. 

And these are the perceived the issues. One is assessment. How do you assess multimodal 
assignments when they are submitted with written assignments? 

In the same way.

My rubrics for my discussion posts are: You have to do the reading, you have to show me that 
you're reading, you have to summarize, you have to analyze the text. Then you have to bring in 
quotes, kind of, from the text. So, as long as I hear that in the audio, I hear and see it in your 
video or in your PowerPoint presentation, then you get rated in the same way as someone who is 
writing something out. Some people think that it's a shortcut -- multimodal assignments are 
shortcuts to traditional writing -- and that's not true because I have so many examples of 
multimodal assignments where the students have done so much work, they put so much time and so 
much effort. 

Videos -- Gavin's video was like seven minutes long, Emily's was five, Valerie's was almost four 
minutes -- of just really articulating and expressing verbally their mastery of the content. So 
it's actually more work to commit to multimodal assignments because you also have to show mastery 
of whatever technological tool you're adopting to commit to the work.

Too much work for the instructor -- not at all, really. The only thing that I did was I had that 
one announcement at the beginning of the semester, and then the rest of my Sakai site is just 
filled with my content.

Cannot work in my subject -- that is also not true. It lends itself really well to the courses 
that I teach: literature, writing, and women's studies, in particular. But there's a lot of 
scholarship that I've come across in my research that shows multimodal projects taking the place 
of traditional research papers, actually, in all contact courses including history, mathematics, 
science, and so forth. 

So there's a lot of innovation going on with multimodal assignments, not just for equity, but as 
well as for engagement -- student engagement -- and meeting them at the plane that they're in -- 
because they're technologically savvy, more so than I am. So we're meeting them where they are 
outside the classroom. So multimodal assignments, they provide students with options to submit 
work in the ways in which they express themselves best, it's unfair for us to keep requiring them 
to express themselves in the traditional manner that doesn't really appeal to their learning or 
expressive methods. 

It removes the monotony of traditional text-centered writing and discussion forums, and it does 
this for us, as well. I can't explain to you how exciting it is for me to be grading -- I'm 
grading, I'm grading -- all this, like, written content, and BOOM, all of a sudden I get a 
PowerPoint presentation! Oh my god, I'm so excited! Or I get a video, oh my gosh, and then 
Valerie's drawing pictures of the novel. It's just so much fun; I can't even tell you. 

I mean, you see it, but okay.

It allows for creativity and individuality. And I think this is my favorite thing, because all our 
students are different. They're not one size fits all, and learning should not be one-size-fits-
all, either. And them expressing their mastery of content to us should also not be one size fits 
all. 

Traditional writing can be seen as a gatekeeper, acting as a barrier to marginalized groups. 
Therefore, multimodal assignments allow inexperienced writers to express their mastery of content 
in a variety of ways centered on their strengths. And my example is, recently, this guy defended 
his dissertation in rap. 

I mean, how cool is that? That that's where we are? That's exciting to me!

And then lastly, this is just like a couple of minutes of my SoTL presentation. This is from my 
SoTL presentation, which I will be presenting in the Fall. 

And that's it, if you have any questions about multimodal assignments, I have tons of research. I 
have tons of information for you, so just let me know. 

Thanks for hearing me out, and have fun. 

Bye!

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