viz.

Image: Mildly Amused

For their final paper, students in my Rhetoric of Tragedy class were asked to make a visual argument and write an accompanying reflection explaining, among other things, their use of rhetorical strategies and the relevance of their choice of medium. While I did not require that students use a particular medium, I taught the students how to make narrated slideshows in iMovie with the understanding that it would become the default medium. In this post, I will briefly discuss my experience with using iMovie in the classroom.

While only the last unit was focused on visual rhetoric, we had discussed visual rhetoric throughout the semester, in large part because of its particular relevance to the kind of events my students were talking about: events in which people are hurt or killed, natural disasters, even (and especially) celebrity downfalls. The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event. On the first day of class, we looked at a multimodal argument (pictured above) to begin thinking about the arguments we make about and with celebrity death. I also showed them the slideshow below, composed by Aric Mayer, as an example of what a narrated slideshow like this might look like.

Aesthetics of Catastrophe from Aric Mayer on Vimeo.

We spent one class period playing with iMovie. Since students were not required to use iMovie, I did not require them to work on their real projects in class; as a result, they made a lot of amusing slideshows, including several that prominently featured baby animals. I think engaging with iMovie in this way made learning the technology fun, but it obviously left little space for discussion of the medium's rhetorical possibilities. We focused heavily on these issues in other classes. Overall, the learning curve was minor and the students seemed to enjoy the process. iMovie also allowed easy improvisation, a quality that, as Eileen mentioned in her review, SoundSlides lacks. The fact that students could dive into iMovie without any prior preparation was very appealing.

Overall, I was happy with the students' final projects, and I was certainly happy with the program. I created a PBWorks workspace for students to upload their projects. Some students who had technical difficulties uploaded their projects as private movies on YouTube; this was an especially good strategy for presentations, since it took no time to get the video ready. I do think that next time I would frame this project as multimodal rather than primarily visual. As Eileen mentioned in her post, considering the auditory is an important part of this kind of composition, and while many students used narration and music in creative ways, the editing was sometimes clunky, which would lessen the slideshow's persuasiveness.

Below is an example slideshow that I made. I used an older version of iMovie than what is available in the labs, but was still able to achieve (more or less) the effects I desired. I did not show this example to my class this semester, but in the future I will likely include it, along with Mayer's slideshow, to give the students an idea of the different forms these slideshows can take. In particular, I wanted to highlight the use of video clips alongside still images.

For a list of images used, see Works Cited