Prior to this activity, students need to have some form of written reflections, perhaps looking back at prior writing instruction, looking ahead and setting personal goals for themselves for this course, or otherwise considering their strengths and needs as writers. For this activity, they practice the act of remediation by translating their reflections into the visual mode.

Objective

To practice the process of multimodal premediation; to begin to comprehend what ideas best translate from a written medium to a photographic one; to begin framing and crafting photographs of your own; to edit a photo in LightroomClassic and begin to explore the program so you can use it deftly later in the semester.

Key Terms

multimodality, photographs, self-assessment, remediation, metacognition

Assignment

Part of the WR 152 emphasis on digital/multimodal expression will be fostering our abilities to transfer ideas and present them in a different medium other than writing (text). This idea is called “remediation,” quite literally, “re-medium[ing]” ideas. To understand the scope and importance of remediation, think about how different media presentations can persuade specific demographics, and how pictures and words together can sometimes elicit a more intense emotional response than either on their own.

  1. Use one or two photographs to reframe some key ideas from your written reflections.
  2. Try to select a few crucial ideas, from your learning style to your needing improvement, and visualize them into a photograph. You may edit the photograph and add text onto it if you wish.
  3. Provide a 2-3 sentence caption giving the who, what, when, where, why, and significance o the photograph. Perhaps try to clarify the question, “What makes this a good remediation of my reflections?”
  4. Note that you will not be graded on your photographic ability, but on your critical thinking and creativity, as shown by how you remediate crucial ideas from your reflections. Your viewer should be able to ascertain the ideas from your photograph(s) without too much text.
  5. Remember that the best visual remediations tend not to rely on their accompanying text to clarify the significance of their image nor how their image is a successful representation of the written text. Ideally, we want our captions to buttress (support) the contents of our photos.
  6. Ask yourself if a viewer would reasonably be able to glean the significance you also explain in your caption.