Feedback:

Responding to Prezi literacy narratives gives instructors the chance to consider how the meaning of the literacy story emerges out of the way students combined modes. Because most students have less experience composing multimodal texts than they do print texts, they are not always aware of how readers will interpret these texts or how the combination of modes will affect the meaning they wish to convey. As Mary E. Hocks (2003) writes, “[T]hrough designing digital  documents and then testing to determine how people see and read them, our students develop an awareness of themselves as active producers of knowledge in their discipline or profession and as agents in the world around them” (205; emphasis added).  Ideally, students will have the opportunity to receive feedback on their Prezi literacy narratives from multiple readers and at multiple times throughout the project. 

In my course, students receive feedback from me and their classmates on early versions of their Prezi and then again after they have a chance to revise.  And at both of these steps, I have found it helpful to focus on how the relations between modes has contributed to the meaning of their literacy stories. Sorapure (2006b) recommends using the concepts of metaphor and metonymy to help students understand how meaning can emerge in the relations between modes—as well as to help herself assess the effectiveness of the way students’ have selected and combined modes. She suggests that the most effective multimodal compositions are those that develop a strong central metaphor via clear metonymic associations, and she contrasts this type of text to those that are highly metaphorical and lack “the kind of broader metonymic associations that would establish context or suggest the implications of these metaphor substitutions” or that lack a central metaphor and therefore develop only weak metonymic associations.

Because of the emphasis on metaphor during the project and within Prezi templates, my students have generally been quite successful developing the metaphorical meanings of their Prezi literacy narratives.  However, as Sorapure contends, the most successful projects not only employ a strong central metaphor but also elicit a series of metonymic connections that help to develop and interpret the central metaphor. Successful in this case means that the relations between the modes employed are richer and more productive and activate both metaphor and metonymy to create meaning.  Taking this approach to my students’ Prezi literacy narratives provides a clear way to respond not only to the literacy story that they narrate but also the way they used multimodality to narrate it. It also helps students to see how multimodal elements impact readers, and, especially during the process of revision, to assume greater control over those elements in order to convey their meaning effectively. In Examples, I include three student projects along with a brief discussion of how the students used multimodality to narrate their literacy stories and how I responded to these projects in order to point students to issues that could help them improve their multimodal literacy.