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Final Portfolio PERFORM

onesie dance.jpg

 

  • To perform is to explore, to play, to experiment with new relations.

  • To perform is to cross borders. These borders are not ony geographic but emotional, ideological, political and personal.

  • To perform is to engage in life-long active study. To grasp every book as a script – something to be played with, interpreted, reformed/remade.

  • To perform is to become someone else and yourself at the same time. To empathize, react, grow and change.

(Schener’s “manifesto of a Performance Third World, 2014, p.51)

 

Our final portfolio is all about putting your knowledge of multimodal composing to work in the world through focused attention on designing and composing an effective multimodal campaign across multiple media.  Course readings in this unit will help us think through multimodality and access as well as how multiple texts can be designed to work together to forward one mission.

 

Your completed final portfolio is due (hosted, again, on your personal site) by NOON Monday, December 16.

 

Your final portfolio is worth 30% of your overall course grade, and will be graded holistically on its effectiveness at making a clear and well-supported case for both:

• your learning over the semester, and

• your ability to thoughtfully design and execute effectively a group of multimodal compositions that work together for a single purpose.

 

Components:

1. Reflective essay

2.Your final intervention project (2-4 text artifacts and 1 rationale)

3.Two UNrevised Blog Posts (you’ll only write 2 in this unit, and you DO NOT need to revise them for the portfolio unless you’d like to. This is to give you more time on your final project.)

4.Two pieces of informal or in-process writing (ideally from your process of composing your final intervention project)

           

           

Prompts for portfolio components:

 

1. Reflective Essay

 

Your final reflective essay should work to synthesize your work from this unit and the course overall.  What did you learn that you'll take with you to your work elsewhere in the world? What questions do you still have, and how might you pursue answers to them? What have you learned about yourself, your interactions with your world, and your agency to impact it through multimodal composing?  Work to unpack your understanding of course concepts here. 

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PRO TIPS:

1. Address your interaction with our course goals in the "LEARNING" section of our syllabus.

2. Demonstrate your understanding of key course concepts like "media affordances."

 

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2. Final Intervention Project

 

This is what we've been working toward - the big banana!  For your final project, you'll deploy your prolific knowledge of multimodal design strategies to compose a coordinated, transmedia set* of multimodal text artifacts to address a real world issue that matters to you.  You might think of your set of artifacts as a "campaign" in the sense of the word's verb form: "work in an organized and active way toward a particular goal, typically a political or social one."  The artifacts you create must work together to help create the change you want to see in the world by forwarding a coherent argument that your audience(s) can be persuaded to act on in tangible ways.  Your artifacts must all address the same issue and work toward a coherent overall goal, though they can and should approach the issue from different directions to increase the breadth and effectiveness of your intervention. 

 

For example, you might create a very different artifact for an audience that is likely to be unaware of or actively disagree with your view of the issue, than the one you create for an audience that is likely sympathetic to or already on board with your argument and needs actionable steps to address it, rather than persuasion to change their point of view.  Similarly, you might have varying demographics of people within your larger audience who would be more persuaded by, or more likely to come across, one type of media than another (i.e. if me and my grandma are both in your imagined audience, a well-circulated Facebook post will be more likely to reach one of us than the other [grandma - she has more free time than me]).  Please try to be thoughtful about your imagined audience's needs while steering clear of ageist and other assumptions - people over 50 can and do use the internet competently (if not in the same ways as youth) and young people can absolutely pay attention to something longer than it takes it to scroll off-screen (but if your artifact is designed for a scroll-y place, it'd better do the work necessary to catch and hold that attention!).  A good place to begin would be pinpointing the stakeholders in your issue who you think most need to hear your message. Consider: people/groups who would have a different view on the subject, those who may have the power to make a change, and those who are or could be adversely affected by [changes made to address] the issue at hand. Draw on your knowledge of each audience to consider the genres that are most likely to speak to and be accessible to those groups.  How can you utilize the conventions of a particular genre and the affordances of a particular medium to influence this actor?

 

*Your set of artifacts will comprise 2-4 separate artifacts, depending on the compositional complexity of your proposed pieces

 

As with your other projects thus far, you will explicate your thoughtful design choices with a detailed rationale.

In 700 to 800 words*, this accompanying text, written as a coherently organized mini essay, will state the overall objective of your project, make a case for how your pieces function rhetorically, and identify what you've learned about genre, persuasion, multimodality, and media affordances in this process. In thinking through your rhetorical choices, you should make a compelling case for:

 

• Why you chose the audiences, genres, modes, and media you did for your aims (why you thought the affordances of these genres, modes, and media would be best suited to your purposes and audiences) and why you made particular design choices within those genres, modes, and media

• How you feel the genres/modes/media limited or enabled you in comparison to each other and other genres/modes/media like those involved in blog posts or academic essays

• Whether you chose to follow generic expectations to a T or tried to push against them in some way and why

• Where or how you would expect your pieces to reach your intended audiences in the real world, how you would expect your artifacts to be received, what kinds of questions they might lead you audience to ask and why

 

*As always, this word count is an educated guess at how long it could take to coherently and usefully address the important criteria sketched out above using concise language. If you feel finished, but your rationale hits below the 700 word count, double check that you've thoughtfully unpacked all of the above issues - don't fluff up with language for wordcount-sake.  Alternatively, if it took more than 800 words to thoroughly address the above issues, work to tighten up your language and reorganize to reduce repetition.  I won't mark down for going under or over the word count; incomplete or unnecessarily fluffy answers, though, are inefficient and will be graded accordingly.

 

Evaluation:

 

The artifact set and rationale that make up your submission for this assignment will be assessed holistically according to the degree to which they accomplish the following:

 

Your persuasive pieces…

 

• Present a clear and consistent message or point of view that is persuasive and specific.

• Compel your reader to act using a range of specifically targeted appeals (ethos, logos and pathos), purposeful design, and convincing evidence to back up your claim/ask.

• Purposefully work within - or push the boundaries of (!) - the conventions for the genres you’ve chosen.  This means not only that the genres you are working in should be recognizable to your target audience in its execution (ex: brochures should be printed so that they fold in the way you want your sections organized and images should be properly placed), but also that you are consciously working with the affordances of your chosen genres/modes/media to aid your persuasion.

 

Your project rationale…

 

• Makes a persuasive case for your rhetorical (including design!) choices

• Demonstrates your understanding of genre, persuasion, multimodality, and media affordances

• Draws on your knowledge of the rhetorical situation surrounding your chosen issue

• Uses language effectively and concisely to make your case for the thoughtfulness of your choices

 

Note that you are also required to submit a chunk of your final project on December 3, and you will be sharing your final project in process with the class December 3rd, 5th or 10th.

 

3. Two UNrevised Theorizing Assignments 

 

You’ll only write 2 in this unit, and you DO NOT need to revise them for the portfolio unless you’d like to, but you still do need to turn them in on time for full credit and incorporate them into your reflective essay.

 

The goal for these is to:

1. *Engage with the theory in the week's reading, (this is the MOST IMPORTANT goal, and should be the major focus of the post)

2. Reflect on and plan for the work your doing in your final intervention project.

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4. Two pieces of informal or in-process writing

 

As with previous portfolios, this is not new writing created for the portfolio. It should still be selected from writing done in the service of your coursework. Ideally, here, this will consist of process drafts of your final project to enable you to talk through that process. The point here is to make legible to me the work you do to learn and experiment with course concepts that doesn't make it into final products.  As with the other components, these are to be woven into the narrative of learning in your reflective essay - think of all the components as evidence of the story you tell about your learning.

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