Incorporating Media Scholarship in the Liberal Arts

Media is pervasive in society and in the lives of college students. However, academic expectations for media and multimodal communication have not been established as they have for oral and written expression. Educators are challenged with teaching students to be effective communicators using media and at the same time be critical consumers of media. NITLE enabled several liberal arts schools to come together and make important strides toward meeting this academic challenge.

What

In 2007, Hamilton College, Colgate University and St. Lawrence University received an Instructional Innovation Fund grant from NITLE to explore the potential of using multimodal assignments to form interdisciplinary connections on liberal arts campuses. The result of this two-year project is a wealth of online resources developed to support media scholarship across the liberal arts curriculum, including 15 case studies of multimodal assignments, best practices and recommendations. This inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional conversation sets the groundwork for significant changes in academic practice.

Who

Project leaders Janet Simons, David Baird, and Chris Watts along with Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences faculty from the three colleges established monthly discussions to define media literacy, propose methods for integrating multimodal skills in assignments and set standards for evaluating course assignments that incorporate a variety of media.

“We were supporting 22 courses per semester,” says Janet Simons, Instructional Technologist at Hamilton College, “and struggling to help faculty evaluate multimedia assignments.” David Baird, of Colgate University, agrees that the motivation to collaborate was to understand “how best to integrate multimodal assignments—to learn from others and provide guidance and best practices.”

How

The Media Scholarship group researched and shared current expertise in teaching and learning with multimodal forms. Their research revealed that including multimodal assignments in courses provided a form of active learning that required students to reflect, evaluate, change course, and produce communication for an audience.

The group held presentations and workshops to further explore the relationship between media and scholarship. They then asked professors of individual courses to complete questionnaires about their multimodal assignments. After analyzing the results, the group presented recommendations for multimodal assignments to assist faculty at peer institutions who are integrating media assignments into their courses. They also provided strategies for evaluating such assignments.

With the help of NITLE, these three campuses were able to increase awareness of media literacy in their curricula, collaborate effectively to share expertise within and between campuses, and establish a collection of resources that other liberal arts schools can benefit from.