By Jen Lee, Media Producer
Attendees at the first-ever Multimodal Scholarship Showcase on April 16, 2025 buzzed with curiosity and enthusiasm, exploring the multiple nooks in the Smith Learning Theater designed to highlight multimodal projects created or supported by the Digital Futures Institute. Video series, podcasts, gallery exhibitions, and blogging were among the modes represented. A highlight of the evening was a panel conversation hosted by DFI’s Managing Director Lalitha Vasudevan and featuring scholars Rachel Talbert, Sarah Gerth van den Berg, Jacqueline Simmons and Beth Rubin.
Here are five takeaways from their remarks, an extended version of which can also be found here.
1: New modes can bring your project to life in presentations, conferences, training sessions and outreach materials
Beth Rubin, a professor in TC’s Curriculum and Teaching department, leads the Civically Engaged Districts (CED) project, bringing youth participatory action research into social studies classrooms in New Jersey and New York school districts. Beth and her team partnered with DFI to create a portal of videos on the CED website that highlights the perspectives of students, teachers, and school leaders, bringing their tips, examples, and insights to others who are considering joining this work or beginning it for the first time.
CED partners have shown the videos in presentations about the project, teacher training workshops, and to students in classrooms–and noticed how powerful having video as a mode is for their audiences.
“For years we've seen these projects, we've seen the incredible work that young people do, the really thoughtful, sensitive work that educators are doing,” Professor Rubin said. “And we can talk about it, and write about it, you know, and I'm sure I've written about it ad nauseum, but there's nothing like actually seeing it. And, you know, photos are powerful but the video material is so, so powerful.”
She later added, “For the kids and the teachers, seeing the work that they're doing from a little bit more of a distance perspective, and seeing what it looks like to have a number of people speaking what they've been doing and the work across different contexts, it has been really empowering. Everything's visual today in our society, and if they want to share what they're doing, it's a lot easier for them to share a video with family or with colleagues than other kinds of media.”
Many scholars have broader audiences they would like to reach with their work: community leaders, educators, policy makers, and other stakeholders that are specific to their area of research or its implementation. As Professor Rubin points out, a scholarly article isn’t always the best vehicle for sharing with those broader audience members. Creating videos allows Civically Engaged Districts to capture the knowledge created by its own stakeholders for easy sharing in teacher training workshops and classrooms, in addition to bringing their work to life on their website.
2: New modes create new avenues for co-authorship
Jacqueline Simmons and Sarah Gerth van den Berg partnered with DFI as they adapted the Black Paint Curriculum Lab into a podcast called Curriculum Encounters. The lab started out in person but pivoted to virtual meetings, as necessitated by the pandemic. Adapting their curriculum encounters into an audio format expanded the way they were able to co-author work with each other.
“What multimodal scholarship does for authorship has been really exciting,” Professor Gerth van den Berg said. “As much as there are efforts (and good ones) to co-author written work and expand the ideas of authorship in written work, it just still feels so much harder to do.
“The collaborative nature of producing knowledge in a podcast or multimodal scholarship just feels so different. It feels so much more natural and open and just that we could do the work together and co-author in that way.”
Scholars can be in conversation in writing, but as the Curriculum Encounters podcast explores, being in an improvised, verbal conversation that is influenced and informed by the environment in which it occurs can bring something additional or different. Through sharing a work of multimodal scholarship, the circle of that conversation expands.
“It's been something I'm able to share with colleagues outside of TC as well,” Gerth van den Berg said, “who are sort of like, ‘Oh, I get this now. And so you mean when I'm in this other space? Here's a way I might relate to the kinds of learning or knowledge or gathering that we're doing here?’
“So that's been encouraging. And my dad has listened to it and is thinking about teaching archery differently . . . those little moments.”
3: New modes may require you to think about your ideas differently
Being an author or lecturer often puts scholars in a presenter-first orientation. Here is what I think, or know, and now I am imparting it. New modes often require scholars to step into an audience-first orientation.
“I was thinking about all of the expertise that we think we have,” Professor Jacqueline Simmons said, “as some kind of expert in some field of knowledge. And then when you’re making media there really needs to be a space to put that in suspension a little bit, because media-making asks something else of knowledge. It requires a different orientation that is sometimes not how we hold the information that we have. It's not how I think about my field necessarily.
“Having a media partner, producer, or somebody in the booth with you, actually bringing their expertise into thinking about: How does that sound? How do you want to communicate? How do you want to frame this story for the listening audience? It's really different. For us there had to be a collaborative negotiation, so that even though it’s our ideas and knowledge that we're putting out there and our voices, we're saying it, there's so much more in there that is shared in the presentation of that research.”
From a producer’s perspective, I advise our creator partners that having a clear idea of their audiences, whether they are listeners, viewers, or participants, may change the way their material is presented. Creators may not be able to assume the same level of expertise in their audience as they would in colleagues, or even students in their fields. New modes will ask them to take their audience on a journey, which means understanding where those audiences are when they first encounter the work, where they want audience members to be after they watch, listen or experience it, and how they intend to get them there.
Having a media partner, producer, or somebody in the booth with you, actually bringing their expertise into thinking about: How does that sound? How do you want to communicate? How do you want to frame this story for the listening audience? It's really different.
4: New modes may add unexpected layers to the story
Rachel Talbert has been partnering with the Lenape Center to create curriculum materials for K-12 students, capturing the story of the Lenape told by Lenape voices. The video series they are creating with DFI, Learning with the Lenape, will be part of this curriculum, as well as part of their broader public pedagogy goals at visitor sites in New York City.
“I think I had an easier task because the Lenape Center knew what they wanted for the curriculum,” Professor Talbert said. “It was good to have the list of things from the Lenape Center, but it really made me and the elders think about the stories differently because of all the different aspects we have on the film.”
To give an example, Professor Talbert says, “Particularly Wall Street really stands out to me as something that we were thinking, ‘Oh, it's the sign and it's the street,’ but there's so much story in that archeological space of where you can see where the posts are–that's still there. You can see that very present wall where Lenape scalps were brought. You can see the traces of that still. And so it's a much more powerful story that would have been imagined by the Lenape Center or imagined by me because of the skills that the film crew provide.”
New modes often add layers to the work that spark more creativity and collaboration in how the story is shared. This is demonstrated by the visual elements of the Learning with the Lenape series, the sounds incorporated into the Curriculum Encounters podcast, and the student-created presentation graphics highlighted in the Civically Engaged Districts videos.
5: New modes expand the reach of scholarly work, and transform the way audiences experience it
The panel host, DFI Managing Director Lalitha Vasudevan, reminds us all why this matters so much. “Stories can move the world,” she said. “The stories that emerge out of research can only do so if they are received and disseminated. But even more than being disseminated, we want to think about ways for people to engage with these stories and these realities that you're all exploring.”
This desire for engagement is a driving force behind multimodal communication. Professor Vasudevan continues, “Part of the work of not only the multimodal scholarship efforts, not only at DFI but across Teachers College, is to think about and create opportunities and conditions for people to encounter and engage stories much more intentionally.”
To dive deeper into the work of the multimodal-scholar panelists, and to share it with those you know who might be interested, visit:
Find more from this panel conversation (including photos from the event) here in our Multimodal Toolkit.