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This pedagogical contribution is targeted towards first-year writing instructors, but may be adapted by any educator seeking methods of teaching students how to critically engage multimodal texts and audiovisual materials. We offer educators a sample AVAnnotate project and documentation as well as a lesson plan for incorporating AVAnnotate into the first-year writing classroom.
First, the basics of the software—creating IIIF manifests, navigating GitHub, publishing and sharing annotations using Jekyll—will be reviewed alongside innovative AVAnnotate projects that have been developed over the past year and are applicable to researchers, teachers, librarians and archivists, and students in DH. This includes a bilingual digital exhibit developed by PhD candidate Vera Burrows, entitled “Radio Venceremos, the Rebel’s Radio Station,” which features recordings from Radio Venceremos (“Radio We Will Overcome”), a popular clandestine radio station from the mountains of Morazan, El Salvador, during the eleven year Salvadoran Civil War (1981-1992). In this way, AVAnnotate is a powerful tool for a variety of scholars studying digital humanities topics that use audiovisual artifacts and require increased accessibility and discoverability.
Beyond its application in research, AVAnnotate is a powerful tool for multimodal composition pedagogy as it teaches students how to work with audio and video artifacts held by libraries, archives, and museums on campus. Beyond analysis and engagement with text- and print-based material, and beyond literacies stemming from text- and print-based resources, a focus on multimodality seeks to engage with different media and communicative modes that embrace the changing technological and social sphere. Some of the foundational texts frequently cited as influential in the field’s explicit turn toward multimodality in the late-1990s and early-2000s called for an integration of audio (Comstock and Hocks; Danforth et al.) and video (Welch 1999) in the composition classroom. Following this avenue, Mary E. Hocks and Michelle Comstock’s article, “Composing for Sound: Sonic Rhetoric as Resonance,” argue that sonic literacy is important because writing is not simply text-based but always involves multiple semiotic modes (see: Ceraso “Sonic Scenes of Writing,” Sound Never Tasted So Good; Hawhee “Rhetoric’s Sensorium”; Hawk and Stuart “English Composition as Sonic Practice). They continue to explain how rhetoric and writing studies scholarship and pedagogy “has worked to unseat the privileged place of text and alphabetic literacy as the center of composing processes” (135). For instance, asking students to compose sound-based or video-based assignments, and using new media technologies such as AVAnnotate to accomplish this work, supports the goals of multimodality. By developing new literacies for students to practice and further grow promotes the communicative, expressive, and rhetorical goals of students.
AVAnnotate accomplishes this through its use of annotation, which Clement and Wintermeier have explained to be an “affordance” of the tool in that this feature promotes engagement with interpretive invention and other aspects of rhetorical listening (2024/5; Ratcliffe 2005). By using annotation to facilitate multimodal composing, students become more aware of how their listening practices contribute to different identifications, readings, and interpretations of audiovisual materials. This accomplishes the “rhetorical listening moves” that Ratcliffe identifies as essential for cross-cultural communication (78), plus it allows for students to hone their rhetorical listening practices. As Clement and Wintermeier explain in terms of the creator and end-user of the AVAnnotate project, “the creator produces annotations for their AV object as they view and listen to their recording by noting significant attributes that resonate with them. Generated within the situated experience of the creator, these annotations also guide how an end-user engages the AVAnnotate project” (n.p.). Therefore, the affordance of annotation lies within the relationship between users and the AVAnnotate software, allowing users to engage with discursive and communicative goals offered by the technology’s interface. Furthermore, Bursztajn-Illingworth and Wintermeier outline an example of this in the “Curricular Context” section of their AVAnnotate DLF Toolkit submission. In a class where students used AVAnnotate, they annotated with attention to how a video of an interview involved the interviewer using specific body language to generate specific responses of their interviewee (n.p.). AVAnnotate’s annotation feature facilitates the development of students’ arguments and their function within future digital contexts.
Educational researchers have long asked what knowledge teachers need to teach students in a contemporary context, and that context is increasingly one wherein “texts are elaborately multimodal, constructed not just of print but of image, sound, and movement” (Ryan et al. 477; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Multimodal learning environments challenge teachers in a number of areas (O’Mara, 2006; Walsh et al., 2007), and educators and researchers have responded by creating frameworks for multimodal analysis and critical thinking (e.g., Hodge and Kress, 1988; Jewitt 2002, 2006, 2008; Jewitt & Kress 2003; O'Halloran & Lim-Fei 2011; Unsworth 2001, 2007, 2008; O'Halloran et al. 2015). In the first-year college writing classroom in particular, teachers face pressure to prepare students for a broad range of collegiate and post-graduate experiences in the ever-shifting technological landscape. Critical engagement with multimodal arguments is thus a necessity for rhetorical education, though teacher training inconsistently prepares educators to enact this type of composition pedagogy. Sharing resources–like pedagogy collections and ready-made tools–is then one way to address this challenge for teachers.
In the classroom, AVAnnotate can be used to facilitate students’ analysis of audio and visual materials. By inviting students to slow down their reading and research practices, engage in close listening and viewing via critical annotation, and offering a platform for students to build their analysis of a given artifact, the lesson plan below offers teachers a way to engage students in multimodal literacy using AVAnnotate.