For many years in my freshmen rhetoric and composition college courses, I have required students to complete a series of multimodal research project assignments to create web articles that respond to real world issues; each web article is to forward an argument (arranged by a rhetorical mode) about a real world issue and is supported by research information from multimodal texts.

Using Multimodal Texts as Evidence to One's Ideas

A multimodal text refers to any text that contains 2 of the 5 semiotic systems: 1) linguistic; 2) visual; 3) audio; 4) gestural; 5) spatial. An example of a multimodal text is a tweet, which offers both the linguistic element (the text content of the tweet) as well as the visual element (images or videos shared in the tweet). Each student's project web article is designed to incorporate multimodal texts as evidence to their ideas.

To complete each project, students are asked to evaluate the credibility of multimodal texts prior to embedding the texts into a web article. Informal and formal sources may be used as long as the student is able to explain the purpose for using each source in the web article. For example, a student might explain that the reason she embedded into her web article a tweet from a general twitter user is to show a layperson's perspective on a given issue (as opposed to the scholarly perspective on the same issue). Capturing important conversations from the web and addressing those conversations using academic research and analysis are some of the goals of completing the multimodal research projects.

The Goals of the Project Are to Acquire Knowledge and Skills in the Following 5 Literacy Domains

1. Critical Media Literacy (e.g. What are the media available for expressing speech? Does each type of media, such as podcasts, radio, television, film, webcomics, websites, blogs, virtual reality, augmented reality, social media, etc.), require users to customize their message in different ways to best reach the target audience? How does each type of social media platform, such as Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Skype, Wechat, Discord, Slack, Tumblr, Periscope, etc., influence our way of communication? What are the target audience for each type of media? How do people, such as activists, spread their social and political messages on different types of media?)
2. Digital and Web Literacy (e.g. How are digital tools designed to influence our thinking? How can we use digital tools to express and broadcast our message? What is the difference between a blog and a microblog? How do digital tools store our information? What does it mean to be a digital citizen?)
3. Information Literacy (e.g. Who is creating the information? From where is the information being spread? What is the authorial intention behind the content and the design of the information? How does the intended audience alter the way the information is expressed? How can we evaluate the information on its credibility and authorial intent?)
4. Rhetorical Expression (e.g. Write long-form essays that are arranged (with a rhetorical mode) to best express an argument to the intended audience).
5. Valid and Sound Argumentation (e.g. Offer arguments that are structurally valid and verifiable by evidence from credible sources).

Sample Student Projects

Below, I will feature a selection of my students' multimodal research projects (web articles) that are rhetorically significant and praiseworthy:

(Note: Students were asked to omit their names from the project to protect their identity and privacy. Also, students were given one week to complete each web article and continue to write a series of web articles on new topics throughout the semester)