Christofer A. Rodelo is an assistant professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. A proud first-generation college student and queer Latinx scholar, he hails from the Inland Empire region of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard University in 2022 and his BA in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration from Yale College in 2015. His research and teaching interests include Latinx and Black Latinx Studies, theater and performance studies, pre-1900 literary and cultural history, and relational race and ethnic studies. At UCI, he is the co-founder of the Latinx Humanities Research Workshop, a university-wide hub for scholars working in the Latinx humanities broadly defined.
What is the assignment?
Final Project: Multimedia Profile of a Latinx Performer Assignment Prompt: Central to the focus of the class is unearthing and understanding the influence of theater and performance on Latinx life and culture. The final project will allow students to become producers and facilitators of knowledge that will enrich wider publics. You will be tasked with researching a Latinx performer/artist/theater-marker and creating a multimedia profile about them on an online repository of Latinx performance. Think expansively about the kind of performer you want to research—you may choose from any genre or style of performance. This profile must be 1500-2000 words and use at least 8 sources. You are encouraged to use multimedia objects (photography, film clips, archival material) as well as digital tools to present information in accessible ways. Your profile should consist of 4 main parts: (1) A biographical section, (2) a performance analysis section, (3) a personal reflection section, and (4) a works cited of your sources. To instill a research practice, we will break this assignment into various parts: Part 1: Research orientation (Week 4); Part 2: Midterm proposal (Week 5); Part 3: Consultation on digital resources (Week 2 and Week 7); Part 4: Peer feedback (Week 8); Part 5: 5-minute oral presentations (Week 10). These short presentations will be a way to share with the class your research journey, what surprised you the most about your research, and what it taught you about the class/yourself.
How does it work?
My goal as a teacher of Latinx Studies is to encourage students to use the knowledge they learn in their classes to engage with broader publics. In this assignment, students are tasked with researching the life of a Latinx performer and doing a critical analysis of one of their performances in a curated multi-media format. I like that this assignment blends the key elements of a traditional research paper (finding and interpreting sources, constructing a thesis, tying in key course themes and concepts) in a format that allows for more creative ways of telling stories about Latinxs. I hope that students who do this assignment expand their definition of what counts as research while also building skills that can be transferred to a variety of professional and personal goals.
Student Artifacts:
Jacqueline Marquez-Ornelas created an exemplary multimodal profile on the performer Jenni Rivera, viewable in the screencast below. If you would like to see the full collection of profiles from CLS 129: Latinx Performance, you can do so here with an active UCI login.
Why does this work?
Digital multimodal composition can help students engage with different genres, mediums, and – as emphasized in this assignment example – audiences beyond the classroom to build their rhetorical awareness and communication skills. Check out these resources for incorporating multimodal composition into your communication classes:
- Supporting Multimodal Literacy from Sweetland Center for Writing
- Multimodality in the Writing Classroom from Boston University
- An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing by Melanie Gagich. This chapter introduces useful drafting and scaffolding strategies for multimodal communication assignments.
