Exposition

The Challenge:

Design a mini-series or limited run podcast series format in your class or course in which students will produce an expository multimodal "text" to answer authentic question(s) aligned to course objectives.

Greene (2018) integrated podcasting as a multimodal alternative to traditional written composition in an advanced writing course at the University of Florida for three main reasons.

  1. Exemplars from seemingly every genre, topic, interest, and fandom are widely available online for students to refer to in composing and recording their expository publications.

  2. Podcasts and quality written compositions have a lot in common - "concision, clarity, coherent organization, showing versus telling, etc." (p. 140) - and require a commitment to compositional decisions that are not as easily revised as a written essay or paper.

  3. Students are able to share, link, and embed their podcasts to a wider network of peers and potential listeners outside of the context of the course, class, etc.

Greene (2018) also reported that students in this course found it helpful to map out their podcasts in class using common podcast episode components such as "introductions, transitions, pacing, sound effects, etc." to better understand organize their expository podcasts and "employ the affordances of audio to create specific rhetorical effects" (p. 148). Such approaches could be particularly valuable in supporting students' understanding of different purposes of composing content for different audiences (Qaddour, 2017).

Greene, J. (2018). Advanced exposition: Writing through podcasts. Composition Studies, 46(2), 137-162.

Qaddour, K. (2017). The use of podcasts to enhance narrative writing skills. English Teaching Forum, 55(4), 28-31.