Instructional Context
CODE121: Transdisciplinary Communication is a skills course that students take in their first semester, alongside their first Research Teams course. Students learn about transdisciplinary approaches and systems thinking as they present their work publicly and write in a variety of genres for multiple formats. The course has a strong emphasis on digital storytelling and multimodal writing.
Objectives
- Practice reading analytically for a college context
- Analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments
- Understand and use rhetorical strategies
- Compose print, visual, and digital media fine tuned for a specific audience
- Organize and deliver speeches in professional and academic contexts
- Find your way around campus and establish a sense of community as SIUE
Syllabus
Assignments
This foundational assignment teaches active and critical reading and helps students hone their writing.
In this assignments, students practice the skill of multimedia writing, focusing on how different kinds of text and media speak to one another. This is also an opportunity for students to find their voice as writers, exploring who they are and how their experiences shape their points of view.
This three-part assignment asks students to consider how content, style, and audience shape multimedia journalism. Their first task is to analyze a piece of multimedia journalism, evaluating who it’s trying to reach and how. They then produce their own video analysis, targeting a specific audience and making rhetorical and stylistic choices in their video to reach that audience.
Throughout their CODES classes, students employ place-based research methods to interrogate the communities in which they live and work. In this collaborative assignment, they put those methods to work through a storymap that critically engages with some aspect of the St. Louis region. This is explicitly a counter-map, which challenges dominant narratives by centering the experiences and relationships of marginalized groups.
