Final Reflection

Compose a critical, multimodal reflection in the modes of your choice (alphabetic, audio, visual, video) on your Quest for Refuge video project. Your audience for this critical reflection is the faculty in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition, who will (hypothetically) be reading it to ascertain your mastery of the course outcomes (see syllabus).

Use Part I, “A Technological Journey”, of Claire Lauer’s “What’s in a Name” as a model of the kind of critical work you need to do in reflecting on your writing process and the end result of your final project. Your goal for this critical reflection is to explain to your readers how you went about creating the text you did, why you made the choices you did in creating the text, and what you’ve learned through the process. Your explanation should be in conversation with the concepts and theories about multimodal composition—and about writing for public audiences—that we’ve studied this semester. In other words, make sure you’re using our readings this semester to contextualize your reflection: Nancy Fraser’s “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere”; Lawrence Lessig’s “Laws that Choke Creativity”; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story”; Erin Anderson’s “The Olive Project”; and Claire Lauer’s “What’s in a Name?”

Use the following questions as a guide for your critical reflection, and be sure to ground your thinking in the learning outcomes for this class:

What was your purpose for this multimodal text? What rhetorical considerations did you have to take up in writing about this issue/topic for a public audience? How did your targeted audience influence your writing choices about argument, evidence, style, etc.?
What theoretical and/or ethical consideration of writing for public audiences guided your work in this project? How?
What affordances are offered by the aural, visual, spatial, and gestural modes involved in your video? Now that you’ve completed your video, how do you feel about your choice of mode(s)? Do they allow you to achieve what you wanted to with the piece? Why or why not?
What was your writing/composing process like? How did you develop your overarching purpose for the video? How did you go about conducting research, creating and collecting assets for use in the piece?
What did you learn through this process that you want to take away with you for future writing situations? What considerations of multimodal writing and/or writing for public audiences do you want to remember for the future? Why? How did your work on this project/in this class help you develop your capacity to be a critical consumer—and producer—of public, multimodal discourse?

Outcomes & Assessment

The final reflection is worth 15% of your final grade. Over the process of composing and revising your reflection you should be able to show progress toward achieving these course outcomes (which are also the basis for assessment):

Rhetorical Knowledge: Demonstrate awareness of and responsiveness to audience, context, and purpose.
Subject-Matter Knowledge: Engage the rich, complex subject matter you have chosen, conducting appropriate research to compose an informed and thoughtful essay for your chosen audience.
Genre Knowledge: Employ genre conventions to serve your purpose(s).
Discourse Community Knowledge: Demonstrate attention to and successful execution of the conventions specific to the discourse community, including organization, content, presentation, formatting, and stylistic/syntactical choices.
Meta-cognitive Knowledge: Evidence thoughtful, reflective practices throughout each step of your compositional process, and discuss those practices in your written reflection.
Writing Process Knowledge: Evidence significant recursive writing/thinking by developing, exploring, interpreting, evaluating, and revising content, style, and design throughout the process of composing your audio essay.
Articulate and apply theoretical, rhetorical, and ethical considerations pertinent to writing in public spheres.
Adhere to appropriate citation conventions, fair use, and copyright for primary and secondary sources from a variety of media platforms.