Multimodal Expression Increases Student Engagement: Artistic and Digital Tools

Workshop Presentation
Kristin Lems  

A university professor looked for ways to maintain and increase engagement when their teacher education classes went all online during the pandemic, and discovered that opening up more modes of expression had lasting benefits in the post-pandemic era. Many kinds of music, digital and tactile art, rhymed and free verse poetry, and audio and video responses to reading assignments are some of the mixed modes that unfolded. The professor, too, became more creative and in turn more personally engaged. The workshop shares some of the innovative and enduring (and endearing) ways that the restrictions of online instruction, with emerging digital tools, ironically opened a funnel into more creative and authentic ways for students to express themselves and share insights, as they also became close as a group.