Lori Beth De Hertogh

ldehertogh@umassd.edu
401-293-3879
loribethdehertogh.com

Multimodal Learning
When designing a course, I start with the idea that students learn and perform at their best when
they engage in multimodal learning. To me, multimodal learning is a pedagogical approach that
encourages students to use what Claire Lauer calls multiple modes (words, sounds, images) and
multimedia (tools, resources, materials) to develop as writers and learners. To support
multimodal learning, I design lesson plans and course assignments that invite students to write in
both print and multimedia modes. In my First-Year Writing courses, for example, students create
research-based persuasive essays that they later repurpose or remediate into multimodal forms
such as posters, comic strips, pamphlets, or videos. As students remediate their projects, they
blog and tweet about their rhetorical and technological choices.

Digital Literacies
In the twenty-first century, literacy also means digital literacy, or the ability to share ones
perspectives in electronic environments. I therefore design course projects that encourage
students to engage in web-based communication and to learn how to use multimedia tools.
In my Technical & Professional Writing and Digital Writing Across the Curriculum courses, for
instance, I ask students to create technical documentation websites, infographics, digital posters,
and multimedia presentations. I also invite students to develop techno-rhetorical literacies (i.e.,
rhetorical maneuvers mediated by technological systems) by collaboratively interrogating three
core questions: What does digital and multimodal writing look like? How does rhetoric function
within and across multimedia texts? Who are the audiences for such creations? Students explore
these questions and others by composing and revising a variety of multimodal compositions.

Local and Global Learners and Citizens

As Linda Flower and Christian Weisser argue, students should learn skills for drafting reports
and essays as well as the skills necessary to become local and global learners and citizens.
I foster such learning by asking students to write about issues that impact their experiences as
students, professionals, and citizens. In my Professional Writing courses, for example, students
research issues related to workplace equality; they then create individual and team-based projects
in which they generate work plans, online worksites, annotated bibliographies, informational
reports, and persuasive proposals. In creating these materials, students experience a range of
professional communication genres while also learning about local and global issues facing
todays workforce.

In sum, by using a multimodal learning approach that focuses on digital literacies as well as
local and global learning, I support students as they learn to create a variety of compositions in
both print- and web-based environments.