This progression of assignments from Advanced Writing and Research for Artists, a seminar for Tisch School of the Arts students, presents a model for professors seeking to incorporate multimodal composition into their pedagogy. Culminating in a video essay, students explore films, television series, documentaries, stand-up comedy, interviews, TED Talks, and blog posts representing a multiplicity of perspectives related to a chosen controversy. After sharing their initial impressions in a vlog pitch, students dive into the research process with a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the most thought-provoking and challenging videos and articles they encounter online. Throughout the process, they keep a viewing journal, a bullet-point catalogue of gut reactions and thoughts that emerge while watching the narrative art that will ultimately form the basis of their arguments. The final video essay allows students to highlight the individual nature of spectatorship and to commit to the ongoing and evolving process of situated thinking. This article examines how the playful integration of audio and visual components in a video essay can foster authentic student thinking, present a holistic sense of the student, increase attention to academic integrity, and dissuade the use of AI-writing tools.

Lay summaries are commonly written by researchers in many disciplines to translate technical scientific concepts into language that can be understood by general audiences. In our first-year introductory biology course, we employed a write-to-learn pedagogy by incorporating a lay summary-style writing assignment that encouraged students to explain the major results of a journal article in their own words, a format we referred to as “blog-style” for our students. We chose to use this format to allow students to focus on understanding, defining and explaining key scientific terminology, without regurgitating technical jargon. Students selected and read a scientific journal article connected to a biotechnology topic at the start of the semester and were given worksheets to complete throughout the semester that guided them in the reading of their article. We also offered in-class workshops that focused on best practices for reading journal articles, how to write for a general audience, and how to avoid plagiarism. Students then composed two-page, lay style summaries highlighting some of the key findings of the articles that they read. This assignment resulted in many students producing engaging, well-written papers that allowed them to demonstrate meaningful understanding of some of the technical terminology and concepts in their articles.

The Field Guide to Lost Futures is a collaborative digital humanities assignment created for an upper-year English and cultural studies seminar. The course engaged with the expansive and complex topic of the Anthropocene, from a humanities and specifically cultural studies perspective. To focus student’s engagements with the many catastrophes associated with the Anthropocene, the assignment asked them to profile a single, concrete example of loss related to ongoing environmental crises in a brief contribution to the Field Guide website. Designed with the isolation and dispersal of students due to COVID-19 virtual learning, the Field Guide assignment brought students together in a collective project without the pressures of group work. The assignment was organized as a portfolio of four low-stakes activities that led to the final Field Guide entry. The scaffolded design and experiential nature of the assignment emphasized the multi-stage nature of writing and revision, as well as editorial considerations unique to writing for an online audience.

In this assignment, students create a podcast episode in which they make an argument on a topic in current events. Through this process, students develop traditional rhetorical skills such as awareness of audience, formulation of a thesis, and inclusion of compelling evidence, in a new context that allows them room for creativity and for approaching these techniques from a different angle. Accustomed to composing analysis essays and research papers on a computer screen, students who create an argument in the aural medium must consider the best way to grab and hold the listener's attention so that the listener's mind does not wander, and to convey information clearly and concisely so that the listener never needs to rewind. Additionally, students become familiar with audio editing software and other aspects of digital composition, and they explore a medium that may feel like a refuge in today's screen-saturated world.

To succeed beyond the writing classroom, students need creative thinking and adaptable, transferable writing and learning strategies, both of which are emphasized by a classroom approach called “postpedagogy.” Postpedagogy emphasizes experimentation and reflection as integral to composing processes, especially digital composing. One feature of postpedagogical classrooms is writing assignments that require students to make a broader range of rhetorical choices and experiment with new approaches, audiences, mediums, and/or technologies. I offer my “definitional text” assignment as an example of one such writing assignment. Though the experimentation encouraged by postpedagogical approaches may lead to initial failures and frustration, such failure can be made productive via intensive, sustained, and specific reflection on composing and learning processes.

Rooted in a hybrid, themed, first-year writing course titled Please Like Us: Selling with Social Media and drawing on the disciplines of business, marketing, and writing studies, the two sequenced assignments explored here rely upon role-playing and “role-writing” for specific outside professional audiences. A semester-long blog project serves as a jumping off point for a researched, multi-disciplinary social media marketing proposal, providing students with the chance to examine social media in both rhetorical and professional terms. The accompanying article explores these assignments in the context of “authenticity” and with an eye toward not only principles of writing pedagogy, but also the transfer of knowledge and process between academic and professional writing.