Transformative Learning Through Narrated Multimedia Presentations: The Case of Organizational Culture
Conference Thread
Applying Transformative Learning in Teaching
Challenging students to show their learning through innovative formats can be transformative. In this interactive session, participants explore opportunities for creating narrated multimedia presentations as an alternative to written compositions. They apply criteria for identifying assignments that can be converted to narrated multi-media presentations (e.g., opportunities for “showing” and “telling”). Participants leave with an action plan for converting assignments into multimedia storytelling projects.
Examples of this assignment genre are taken from an introductory organizational communication course. Students select an organization to which they have access. Once permission has been secured, they collect and interpret a set of artifacts in categorizing the organization’s culture based on the CVF, or competing values framework (Cameron & Quinn, 2011).
The students present and support their claim about the organization’s culture through a narrated PowerPoint presentation. The primary medium for linking the central claim with the artifacts is the student’s recorded narration. After introducing the organization, students provide background information about the CVF for an external audience of prospective employers, internship supervisors, and graduate school directors. One slide is dedicated to the central cultural claim, followed by ten organizational artifacts.
As a result, students gain new perspectives on organizations, storytelling, audience analysis, and argumentation. They learn how to interpret qualitative data and to engage in inductive reasoning as they ground a claim about the organization’s culture. Students gain meaningful experiences in integrating images, video, text, animation, and oral communication through a multimedia presentation.