Anxiety and Relationship Goals in the Video Essay

I teach First Year Writing courses at St. John’s University, and for the first time this semester, I assigned what we called a video essay. I’ve previously asked students to create short documentary films before, but I decided to make the video essay an option after the work I saw on the website StoryCenter.

When writing incorporates some combination of text, images, links, sound, and video, it is called multimodal writing. I ask my students to do digital multimodal writing because of the degree to which their reading, writing, and thinking happens in conjunction with the screens of their devices. I think the less students read and publish in digital spaces, the more they are likely to be manipulated by them.

screenshot from Jessica’s video essay

If you’d like to see the directions I gave the class for the video essay, you can click here.

Two of my students gave me permission to share their essays. I think you’ll really enjoy them!

Here is Jessica’s essay about relationship goals:

And here is Jisan’s about anxiety:

Thanks for taking the time to check out some of what we were up to this semester!