Inclusion through Narrative: A Multimodal Personal Narrative Assignment in the First-Year Writing Class

Rajwan Alshareefy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

SUMMARY OF THE ASSIGNMENT

Title: Multimodal Personal Narrative (MPN)

Taught in: First-year writing

Time to teach: Approximately two weeks

Key Features: personal writing; narrative storytelling; multimodality; social justice thinking; critical reflection; labor-based assessment

Suggested Class Readings and Tools:

“Writing an Autobiographical Narrative” from Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing
“Narrative Writing” from Everyone’s an Author
“Storytelling, Narration, and the ‘who I am’ Story” by Catherine Ramsdell in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing
“An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” by Melanie Gagich
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson
“Stupid Rich Bastards” by Laurel Johnson Black
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by Richard Rodriguez
Canva

In Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, bell hooks (2010) notes that she “had been trained to believe that anyone who relied on a personal story as evidence upholding or affirming an idea could never really be a scholar and/or an intellectual, according to dominator thinking via schools of higher learning” (p. 49). In my view, when such a perspective on personal writing dominates higher education, it can lead to favoring “academic” and argumentative writing at the expense of the personal. Therefore, I begin my FYW course with a narrative assignment in which I ask students to write about an experience that impacted their identities and/or changed the way they perceive aspects of the world around them. This assignment does not require specific “academic” formatting (such as font size, citations, headings, etc.) and encourages students to explore, (re-)think, and voice their important stories and experiences in a creative open space. As an introductory project, this writing assignment ameliorates students’ stress about college writing that traditionally urges students to mainly produce non-personal/impersonal writing such as scientific-empirical, research-based papers. In this article, I argue that multimodal personal narrative (MPN) writing creates a more inclusive and culturally responsive writing course.

PERSONAL NARRATIVE

A personal narrative, here, refers to a narrative account of a meaningful event or experience from the author’s life told from their perspective. Using personal narrative in the writing classroom has various benefits in developing students’ writer identities (Elbow, 1995; Bishop, 1997). Scholars argue that personal narrative writing has the potential to develop students’ voice and agency (Bathina, 2014) and empower marginalized and underrepresented students in academia (Nash, 2019; Nash & Viray, 2013).

Scholars and practitioners utilize and study various forms of personal writing in the academic setting, including scholarly personal narratives, memoirs, and counterstories. For instance, Nash and Viray (2013) introduce the Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) where students write their perceptions, interpretations, and responses to social justice issues. The SPN method encourages students to write their stories and share their perspectives on pressing social justice issues while gaining “a newfound sense of pride and ownership of the worth of their own stories and the validation of their own experience” (Nash & Viray, 2013, p. 4-5). Mack (2023), utilizing a memoir assignment, focuses on reflection on issues of identity conflicts, literacy, and marginalization. These narrative assignments “can create an empathetic space where a meaningful emotional exchange among students and teachers can welcome difference and lead to opportunities for mentorship… [a space] for writing themselves into the university” (n. p.). Mack (2021) also indicates that identity-focused memoir writing invites marginalized, first-generation students to construct their academic identities and establish themselves as legitimate contributors to the academic community. Similarly Martinez’s (2014; 2020) emphasized the power of narratives, namely, counterstory, where marginalized voices, particularly those of people of color, can intervene in and challenge dominant “stock” narratives that normalize structural racism in academic spaces. Counterstory identifies institutional inequalities, expands student understanding of knowledge production, and challenges racist structures to create more inclusive academic spaces.

MULTIMODAL NARRATIVE WRITING

The turn to multimodality in composition (as a necessary undertaking in the modern composition classroom) has been an ongoing response to the advancements in modern technologies and media production (Yancey, 2004; Palmeri, 2012; Alexander & Rhodes, 2013). Composition practitioners and scholars indicate that multimodal narrative writing encourages students’ voice and agency and enhances their meaning-making ability through the aural, visual, and spatial modalities within the traditional narrative assignments (Kitalong & Miner, 2017). For example, Medina (2018) proposes using digital multimodal testimonio in writing courses to challenge dominant narratives by making space for students, especially Latine and other students of color, to express their experiences and subjectivities. In a similar vein, Aguilera and Lopez (2020) devise critical digital storytelling which involves asking students to use digital media to create videos of their experiences as first-generation college students to share and critically reflect on their stories and their complex digital literacy practices. Another example is Hope et. al.’s (2022) study in which a Multimodal Literacy Memoir (MLM) “asks students to contemplate the ebb and flow of their literacy lives, from early childhood to the present” thus viewing literacy as a practice that is deeply interconnected with the students’ histories and life experiences as opposed to a view of literacy as the mere ability to read and write (p. 45).

INCLUSIVITY IN A MULTIMODAL PERSONAL NARRATIVE ASSIGNMENT

Personal narratives and multimodal composition have the advantages of fostering agency, empowering students, developing a writer’s identity, and enhancing the meaning-making process. Considering these advantages, I utilized a Multimodal Personal Narrative (MPN) assignment in my first-year writing course. The underlying principles of this assignment are in line with some of David Moinina Sengeh’s (2023) principles of inclusivity in education, namely:

Identifying the exclusion
Listen, to understand and learn
Advocacy and action (p. 16).

In the following section, I discuss how this assignment relates to some of Sengeh’s principles of inclusion. I then detail the course context, student population, assignment goals, required readings, procedural description of one lesson in action, assessment approach, post-assignment reflection, and a few challenges to the implementation of an MPN.

SENGEH'S RADICAL INCLUSION IN THE MPN

The first principle of “radical inclusion” that Sengeh (2023) lists is “identifying the exclusion.” He argues that to fight exclusion from education, there needs to be a way to understand and name it first. The way to do this, he contends, is to listen to the stories of the oppressed and excluded. Through this MPN assignment, I open the door for students to narrate their lived experiences of identity formation, education, and success among other things. Over several semesters of teaching this assignment, the stories of fear, anxiety, marginalization, disenfranchisement, confidence, self-empowerment, coping, migration, assimilation, success, and (dis)ability were eye-opening and instrumental in shaping my pedagogical approach to be more inclusive and diverse. Knowing more about the students provided much needed information for me to build my syllabus, prepare my lesson plans/materials, and adapt my instructional style.

The second principle that is relevant to my MPN assignment is to “listen, to understand and learn.” Sengeh (2023) shows that to understand the problem of exclusion, there is a need to listen attentively and actively to not only the excluder but more importantly to the excluded. He emphasizes: “Active listening—listening to understand and to learn—is a critical skill for leaders and for anyone else who seeks to advocate for justice and change social norms” (p.48). Learning about and valuing others’ stories develops empathy, understanding, and acceptance of differences. This in principle is what my MPN assignment seeks to achieve through learning more about the students’ experiences and listening to their stories as a way to modify my teaching approach. This narrative assignment gives me the chance to engage with students’ experiences on the social and personal levels without necessarily having to strictly judge or evaluate their writing (I further discuss my assessment approach in the assessment section below). Engaging with students’ stories and learning about aspects of their significant social, educational, and emotional experiences, I become more informed and able to adapt my teaching to reflect my students’ experiences and aspirations.

Sengeh’s “advocacy and action” is the third principle I enact in my MPN assignment. Action to me is represented by my attempt to tailor certain aspects of my teaching to be sensitive to students’ social and cultural backgrounds. The assignment advocates for the students in the sense that their stories and voices become central and key in my course––a course that serves as an initiation to academic, college-level writing. This assignment is one way for me as an instructor to advocate for my students and to take action to include the students’ voices and aspirations in my composition course. More broadly and in other courses, advocacy is possible through listening to students’ voices, establishing better (student-teacher) communication, and incorporating the personal aspect in course/assignment designs. Engaging in such practices in education empowers students and encourages them to stand up for their rights, promotes equity and inclusion, and helps the students to become resourceful as they seek the help they need as learners.

COURSE CONTEXT, STUDENT POPULATION, AND ASSIGNMENT GOALS

The course in which I teach the MPN is a required, first-year writing course that’s part of the university’s core curriculum writing requirement. This course is taught at a large research university in the northeast United States. The university serves students from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds with a majority white student population (69%) (University’s Data on Diversity, 2022). While my class serves students from various ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds, the majority of students in my classes are white with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender orientations, and varied abilities. The majority of the students are monolingual.

The general course goals are set by the first-year writing program for all instructors to follow. One of these goals states that students will “[w]rite in different modes (alphanumerically, visually, aurally, digitally)” which means that there was a requirement for all instructors of this course to incorporate multimodality in at least one of their course assignments. The main goals of my MPN assignment, which I share with the students, are as follows:

Learning to write a concise, well-organized, and engaging story by utilizing the common features of a narrative.
Learning about yourself through thinking, reflecting, and writing about your lived experiences—the experiences which shaped aspects of your social and academic identity.
Engaging in peer review activities to give and receive constructive feedback.
Learning about your classmates’ experiences and worldviews to build a class community.
Creating a multimodal text by incorporating visual, spatial, and/or aural modes in your text.

There is another set of goals that I, as an instructor, want to achieve through this assignment. These are goals that I do not share with my students, but are as essential as the goals above:

Learning about the students’ experiences and getting to know them on the social and personal levels.
Offering students a safe space to express their thoughts and sound their voices as they begin their academic journeys in higher education.
Offering students an opportunity to use various modes creatively and go beyond the alphabetical mode of writing which may not be equally accessible to all students.

READINGS AND ASSIGNMENT PREPARATION

This assignment takes two weeks to complete. During this time, the students engage in various activities including reading about narrative writing and multimodal composition, analyzing written text for common narrative features, writing two drafts, and finally receiving and providing feedback to their classmates. The readings are of two types. The first set of readings is about understanding concepts of narrative writing (e.g., plot, theme, narrative discourse, narrative/real time, reflection, and introspection). The readings for this purpose come from writing textbooks such as “Writing an Autobiographical Narrative” from Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing (2018) and “Narrative Writing” from Everyone’s an Author (2017). Additionally, the readings also include articles from Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, an open-access book series. Specifically, I assign articles such as “Storytelling, Narration, and the ‘who I am’ Story” by Catherine Ramsdell (2011). Students are also introduced to multimodal composition through reading “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” by Melanie Gagich (2020).

The second type of readings comprises actual narratives (e.g., memoirs or literacy narratives) such as part of Bill Bryson’s book I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. After reading the first type of articles and learning about the how-to and the concepts of narrative writing through class discussions and activities, students then engage in analyzing the second type of readings. For instance, we read chapter one of Bill Bryson’s book to examine how the description of the setting works and how the reflections are woven into the events in hopes that students would imitate these techniques in their own narratives.

In the post assignment reflection essay, many of the students shared that multimodal composing was a new concept for them especially because it was in an academic setting. As such, I spend a few class sessions focusing on teaching multimodal composing. I do that through, first, rationalizing multimodal composing through discussing the idea that we engage in multimodal composition on social media when we combine images, sounds, and text to get our message across. I also discuss how significant it is to write multimodally assuming that our audience has “multiple intelligences.” Secondly, we examine and compare texts that are composed and presented in various modalities. For example, I ask students to read a short paragraph from an e-book and elicit their impressions of it. I then play the audio version of that same paragraph as it is read by the author. Following this, we discuss the differences between the two experiences. This activity highlights the advantages of each mode (alphabetic text & audio) and shows the students that the different modalities can have different impacts on the audience.

Thirdly, through class activities, I engage students in analyzing multimodal digital texts. We focus on the rhetorical effectiveness of each element in these texts, the relationship between the elements, and how the text is organized and designed. Following this, the students start thinking about what modes and materials they can include in their narratives to enhance the meaning-making experience (for themselves as writers and for the readers).

Fourthly, I do a technology demonstration. For example, I do a workshop on Canva in which the students create a Canva account and explore some of its features including adding images and sound, organizing and designing text, and modifying templates. I also offer some instructions on how to integrate images and embed video or sound in google documents or Microsoft Word. Students have the chance to design their narratives during these workshops and have the opportunity to ask about any technology issues. For the purpose of this assignment, there are no restrictions on what applications are to be used to create the multimodal narrative. Some students use applications that they are familiar with to design and create their narratives.

DESCRIPTION OF A LESSON IN ACTION

The lesson I zoom in on in this section is the second in six class meetings dedicated to this assignment. Preceding this lesson is an introduction to the MPN assignment. In preparation for this lesson and before coming to class, students are asked to read a book chapter entitled “Writing an Autobiographical Narrative” from Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing. The chapter discusses narrative concepts such as conflict, resolution, plot, and theme as well as narrative elements such as the importance of dialogue, character development, and setting description.

This lesson’s objectives include:

Discussing the reading and learning about some narrative concepts, and
Analyzing a sample narrative to see how narrative elements work in an actual narrative.

I use a PowerPoint presentation and electronic copy of the first chapter of Bill Bryson’s book, which I make available to students on their course website.

I begin my presentation with open-ended questions: What did you learn from today’s reading? And how can it be useful in thinking about and drafting your narrative? After I hear from multiple students, I present some of the concepts in the chapter (such as plot, theme, conflict, and tension). This usually takes 10 minutes. Following this, I ask students to read the first article in Bill Bryson’s book, which is about three pages long. The students work in groups of three to analyze this narrative guided by the following questions:

Where do you see a tension/conflict/contrary in the narrative?
How do you evaluate the presence or absence of details throughout the narrative?
Do you see a moment of revelation/realization in the narrative?
Do you see any reflection or introspection?

The students spend 30 minutes reading the narrative and discussing these questions in their groups. Then each group reports back to class on what the group had discussed. I offer my own response and observations about the narrative as well while linking the discussion to the MPN assignment.

ASSESSMENT APPROACH

When I first introduce the assignment to the students, I share with them the following criteria:

Significance, focus, and connection: whether the narrative is focused on a specific, significant event, person, experience, or theme (e.g., education); whether the narrative makes a clear connection between a significant event and its impact on the writer’s worldview or identity, whether the narrative includes a good level of reflection and depth in examining and explaining the writer’s perceptions/feelings towards the various events/people/places.
Modalities: how effectively the different modes were used to enhance the reader’s meaning-making experience.
Description and details: how the description of the setting and emotions was used to impact the reader.
Length and organization: how space was utilized creatively and effectively to reflect the intended meaning for the reader.
A draft on time: whether the student submitted their draft on time for peer review.

I use these criteria as general guidelines and a reference point for students’ work. I also use them as a guide for my feedback on their work. The students’ effort to follow these criteria is essential to my assessment approach. This approach is partly informed by Asao B. Inoue’s labor-based grading which focuses on the amount of labor students put into their work rather than focusing on the quality of their final product. This approach promotes an equitable and more inclusive classroom by dissociating high grades from the dominant, often racially biased standards of quality.

According to Inoue (2022), “Grades on assignments also do not encourage students to think, feel, or behave in ways that orient them toward learning or growth” (p. 236). A labor-based grading approach encourages a more productive growth mindset toward learning. As such, I communicate that as long as they put in the effort and do their best to produce an engaging, meaningful, and purposeful narrative, they will get the maximum possible grade on this assignment. The students’ labor to complete the assignment includes attending class sessions, providing helpful feedback on a classmate’s draft, engaging in class discussions leading to the final submission, in-class writing, and significant engagement with the feedback and revisions. For example, if a student attended all class sessions, provided quality feedback, engaged in class discussions, did the readings, submitted the assignment drafts on time, revised their draft based on the instructor’s/classmate’s feedback, and made use of in-class writing time, they will receive the maximum possible grade. This equitable assessment approach ensures that every student (regardless of their racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic, cultural, and educational backgrounds) is included and valued based on the effort they invested in learning.

CHALLENGES OF IMPLEMENTING MPN

As fun as it may sound, this assignment does not always appeal to all students. Many of them are accustomed to writing argumentative, analytic, and research essays which means that writing a narrative about themselves can be a daunting and unfamiliar task. They come to college writing courses with the expectation that they will learn how to write scientific research papers. This makes some of them resistant to the idea of writing a personal narrative assignment. Through class discussions and rationalization, I convince some of the students of the value and benefit of writing their reflective, personal narratives.

The other challenge that I encounter is that some students are not comfortable sharing their personal stories and experiences with their classmates, especially at the beginning of the semester when they do not know their classmates well. They do not want to appear vulnerable to others. In order to mitigate their stress, I ask students to share their stories with only one or two classmates during a peer review workshop. Even with that, a few of them are only comfortable sharing their work with me. This unfortunately subverts one of the assignment goals to build a class community through learning about one another’s experiences.

A third challenge is that some students are not particularly excited about using other modes in their writing. They could not see the point of including visual, aural, or spatial modes in their texts. They are comfortable with what they already knew, the familiar alphabetical text. Some of their topics do not lend themselves to visual or aural modes which makes the integration of other modes even harder. As a solution, I try to have them narrate part of their stories, record their voice, and add this recording to their assignment but I have not been successful with that so far.

POST-ASSIGNMENT REFLECTION AND CONCLUSION

In my first-year writing courses, I have taught hundreds of students over several years. In all these courses, I have used some form of narrative assignment, and my purpose has always been to learn more about my students and to adapt my teaching approach accordingly. This narrative assignment has become an important part of my teaching philosophy. I may have forgotten my students’ names and perhaps how they looked but I can still remember many of their stories and experiences. The students often wrote and shared their lives passionately and excitedly without being intimidated by strict academic writing standards and that made their writing process more enjoyable and more meaningful than that of drafting/research-based texts.

The assignment enabled me to embrace diversity and inclusion through multimodality and the flexibility of the writing style and requirements. For instance, one of my multilingual international students excelled in writing this assignment because she happened to be an artist. In her narrative, she drew three different surreal sketches to describe her mental and emotional state during a traumatic event (see Figure 1 & 2, used with student’s consent). No words could have been as effective as her sketches. She utilized art as a form of expression to assist her writing in its alphabetical mode.

Figure 1: Sample 1 Student Sketch for the MPN Figure 2: Sample 2 Student Sketch for the MPN

Flexibility in writing expectations is another aspect that serves to create a more equitable and inclusive assignment. Students are encouraged to code-switch and/or use different English varieties. For instance, one student, who identified as Black, was not reluctant to structure some of his sentences in ways common in African American Vernacular English such as double negation and variation in subject-verb agreement. For him and for me as a reader, it was more meaningful to use this variety to represent his experience and perform his identity in writing. Multilingual students capitalized on their language repertoires and used code-switching. In their narratives on identity and migration, for instance, they used languages other than English as a way to highlight their belonging to a transnational space. Code-switching was used on a limited scale and the words or phrases that were used from other languages were explained in English to make them accessible to the reader. These code-switching moves were used to express certain aspects of the writer's identity and their sense of belonging to or affiliating with a certain group, language, or culture.

As an instructor, learning about students’ stories was key in designing aspects of both the assignment itself and my approach to teaching writing. One example of a response to students’ stories was to diversify the readings assigned to the students to reflect the struggle of working-class students. A reading that I assigned, “Stupid Rich Bastards” by Laurel Johnson Black (1995), led to a critical class discussion on the role of language in society. Other topics inspired by students’ stories of migration, success, and identity formation included analyzing and discussing parts of Richard Rodriguez’s (1982) Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, a story that is meaningful and relatable to many migrant students in my FYW course. Some students shared stories of their learning disabilities and related challenges. A student’s learning disability, that was not necessarily diagnosed and validated by the university (due to the high cost associated with the diagnosis), motivated me to talk to the students one-on-one, provide extra assistance, give extensions to complete assignments throughout the semester, send presentation slides before class, and offer different forms of feedback on the students’ work (e.g., video or audio comments).

The more I learn about students, the more I continue to adapt my teaching strategies and approaches to maximize students’ learning and to make sure that students’ voices are heard. In Sengeh’s (2023) work, action and advocacy may take various forms but the whole process must start with listening actively and attentively with the intention to change the status quo.

As I write this manuscript and reflect on my MPN assignments, I do think that in the future I will need to modify the following aspects:

I think it’s important to establish some rapport and connection among the students through community building activities before starting this assignment. This is important because some students felt less comfortable sharing their personal stories with their classmates.
The assumption that I have is that all the students are generally tech savvy and would figure out the technology with minimum effort. However, I always come to realize that many students need hands-on guidance to integrate images, design a page, or record a voice-over. In the future, I would spend more time during class to assist students with their technical and digital needs.
Lastly, I would ask the students to deeply reflect on their meaning-making process when reading a multimodal text. This can be done through asking the class to read and analyze a multimodal text and reflect on how they made sense of the combination of the visual, textual, aural, and spatial modes. Getting students’ perspectives on this helps developing and modifying the subsequent instruction and class activities.

REFERENCES

Aguilera, E., & Lopez, G. (2020). Centering first-generation college students’ lived experiences through critical digital storytelling. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(5), 583–587.

Bathina, J. (2014). When the subaltern finally speaks: Personal narrative as a means to identity and voice. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(1), 27-35.

Bishop, W. (1997). Teaching lives: Essays and stories. Utah State University Press.

Black, L. J. (1995). Stupid rich bastards. In C. L. B. Dew & C. L. Law (Eds.) This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class (pp. 13-25). Temple University Press.

Bryson, B. (1999). I’m a stranger here myself: Notes on returning to America after twenty years away. Broadway Books.

Elbow, P. (1995). Being a writer vs. being an academic: A conflict in goals. College Composition and Communication, 46(1), 72–83.

Gagich, M. (2020). An introduction to and strategies for multimodal composing. In D. Driscoll, M. Stewart, & M. Vetter (Eds.) Writing spaces: Readings on writing (Vol 3, pp. 65-85).

hooks, b. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. Routledge.

Inoue, A. B. (2022). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom (2nd ed.). The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2022.1824

Hope, K., Alford, K., & Chatham-Vazquez, R. (2022). Multimodal memoirs: Re-envisioning literacy narratives. English Journal, 111(6), 45-51.

Kitalong, K. S., & Miner, R. L. (2017). Multimodal composition pedagogy designed to enhance authors’ personal agency: Lessons from non-academic and academic composition environment. Computers and Composition, 46, 39-55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.09.007

Lunsford, A. A., Brody, M., Ede, L., Moss, B. J., Papper, C. C., & Walters, K. (2016). Everyone’s an author. W. W. Norton & Company.

Mack, N. (2021). From literacy narrative to identity-conflict memoir: Agency in representation. In K. Ritter (Ed.), Beyond fitting in: Rethinking first-generation writing and literacy education (pp. 282-299). The Modern Language Association of America.

Mack, N. (2023). Marginalized students need to write about their lives: Meaningful assignments for analysis and affirmation. Composition Forum, 52. https://compositionforum.com/issue/52/marginalized-students.php

Martinez, A. Y. (2014). A plea for critical race theory counterstory: Stock story versus counterstory dialogues concerning Alejandra's "Fit" in the academy. Composition Studies, 42(2), 33-55.

Martinez, A. Y. (2020). Counterstory: The rhetoric and writing of critical race theory. National Council of Teachers of English NCTE.

Medina, C. (2019). Digital Latinx storytelling: Testimonio as multimodal resistance. In C. Medina & O. Pimentel (Ed.) Racial shorthand: Coded discrimination contested in social media. Computers and Composition Digital Press.

Nash, R. (2019). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Nash, R., & Viray, S. (2013). The who, what, and why of scholarly personal narrative writing. Counterpoint, 446, 1-9.

Palmeri, J. (2012). Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy. Southern Illinois University Press.

Ramage, J. D., Bean, J. C., & Johnson, J. (2018). The Allyn & Bacon guide to writing (8th edition). Pearson.

Ramsdell, C. (2011). Storytelling, narration, and the “Who I Am” story. In D. Driscoll, M. Stewart,& M. Vetter (Eds.) Writing spaces: Readings on writing (Vol 1, pp. 270-285).

Rodriguez, R. (1981). Hunger of memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez. The Dial Press.

Sengeh, D. M. (2023). Radical inclusion: Seven steps to help you create a more just workplace, home, and world. Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book.

Yancey, K. B. (2004). Made not only in words: Composition in a new key. College Composition and Communication, 56, 297-328.

MPN ASSIGNMENT SHEET

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to engage in writing a multimodal personal narrative and to build a classroom community through reading and learning about your peers’ stories and experiences. Narratives are an important part of our everyday lives both in and beyond college. Writing about your experience will urge you to think, reflect, and better understand your identity and your purpose in relation to a broader social, political, and cultural environment. Additionally, reading others’ stories will raise your awareness and appreciation of other people’s struggles, joys, successes, and worldviews.

Assignment Goals

This assignment has the following goals:

Learning to write a concise, well-organized, and engaging story by utilizing the common features of a narrative.
Learning about yourself through thinking, reflecting, and writing about your lived experiences—the experiences that shaped aspects of your social and academic identity.
Engaging in peer review activities to give and receive constructive feedback.
Learn about and work with your classmates’ experiences and worldviews.
Incorporating visual, spatial, and/or audio elements in your text as a way to understand and experience multimodal composition.

Your Task

You will write an account of a personal experience, a narrative about an event, a person, or a place that had an impact on your identity or that changed the way you view (aspects of) the world around you. You will provide enough details about what happened, how you felt, who was involved, and most importantly, the lesson you learned. You should provide enough details about the people (characters) and the setting (time & space) so that your audience would be able to walk in your shoes and have a clear picture of what you have experienced. Make sure the story is about something you can comfortably share with me and your classmates. The text you will compose is multimodal which means you will need to use visual, verbal, audio, and/or spatial modalities to compose your text. Your story should be approved by the instructor before you start drafting.

It is important that your story has a purpose. In other words, after reading your work, your reader should be able to answer the questions of why this narrative matters? And what’s the point of the story? It’s equally important that the story has an element of introspection or reflection throughout the text. It should not be a mere chronological listing of events.

Audience

Your potential audience is your classmates and your instructor.

Format and Length

There is no specific formatting required for this assignment. However, make sure to:

have between 900-1000 words.
have at least three modalities (e.g., two pictures, and a song; three drawings; a picture, a sketch, and a short video clip; etc.).
be creative with the space you have and the modes you will use.

Some Writing Tips

Students have written about education, literacy, identity conflicts, how race/gender/class affected their lives, choices they made, resistance, growing up, taking responsibility, entering college, leaving home, and work experience.
You should use first-person pronouns (I, we) since this text is about you. You can also use third person pronouns (he, she, it, they) as needed.
An appealing feature of a good narrative is detailed description. Use this wisely and effectively to describe the setting and characters.
You are free to code-switch if you feel the need for it (“code” could mean another language or another variety of English).

Evaluation Criteria

This paper is worth 15% (150 points) of your total course grade. Your grade will primarily reflect your effort to meet the following criteria:

Engaging (20 points): Your narrative is engaging and interesting for the reader throughout the entire piece.

Significance, focus, and connection (30 points): The narrative is clearly focused on a specific, significant event, person, experience, or theme (e.g., education). The narrative demonstrates a clear connection between a significant event and how it impacted your worldview, your identity, or the way you perceive things now. The story has a good level of reflection and depth in examining and explaining your perception/feelings toward the various events/people/places in your story.

Modalities (30 points): Your narrative incorporated a minimum of three modalities. These visual, audio, or spatial elements are well-integrated in and connected to your narrative. The media used enhances and enriches the reading experience of your viewer. The media supports the narrative in ways words could not.

Description and details (20 points): The story includes relevant details about and description of people, places, experiences, etc. to enable the reader to have a clear picture of the actions, feelings, relations, time, place(s), and people involved in the story.

Conciseness and style (10 points): your writing is concise, coherent, and clear. You have carefully chosen your words and sentences. Your writing flows smoothly and is easy to follow.

A draft on time (40 points): You have submitted a well-developed draft on time for peer review. The draft should have at least 2 pages of text.

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