Published Date: 2026
Context
Florida International University is an R1 public research university in Miami. Offering bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, both on campus and fully online. FIU is worlds ahead in its service to the academic and local community. Designated a Preeminent State Research University, FIU emphasizes research as a major component in the university’s mission.
Course title: Rhetoric & Writing (First-year writing), an in-person two-course sequence that expands upon the writing and rhetorical strategies and furthers students’ abilities to write and research arguments. Written work meets the state composition requirement and is a prerequisite for many majors at Florida International University, MMC campus, Miami, Florida. Completion of this course with a grade of C or better is linked to earning the Florida Public Postsecondary Fundamentals of Written Communication digital badge.
Reflection
This assignment invites students to explore how AI and digital tools—such as Canva, Adobe Spark, or open-source software—can transform personal and academic reflections into immersive digital collages. Participants combine images, sketches, text fragments, and digital textures to construct layered visual narratives that express insights, emotions, and critical ideas. Final projects will be presented as a collaborative digital gallery for the Rhetoric & Writing class, highlighting how individual reflections throughout the process of research can be remixed into collective, multimodal artifacts. The activity fosters creativity, visual literacy, and the translation of reflective thoughts from textual to visually engaging and compelling arguments/narratives.
In order to maintain and ensure multiple ways to access content, express understanding, and stay engaged, I devised a visual AI reflection. Through social justice issues like equity, access, and recognition, the idea that diverse students generate narratives through multi-dimensional realities, the kind they live in and interact on a daily basis. A single-mode assessment (written essay alone) structurally advantages some learners while marginalizing others, while offering multiple means of expression—memes, images, graphs, galleries. The assignment operationalizes Universal Design for Learning not as accommodation but as default design.
Visual and multimodal modes of reflection allow translingual students like the majority at FIU to demonstrate sophisticated rhetorical understanding without being penalized for English writing fluency alone. I have seen this time and again that students with dyslexia, ADHD, anxiety around high-stakes writing, or other learning differences often find that their thinking genuinely organizes better in visual or spatial modes. Students from Caribbean, Latin American, African, and Indigenous backgrounds bring rich traditions of visual storytelling, oral rhetoric, and community-based communication. The invitation to combine images, sketches, text fragments, and digital textures means no single skill set is prerequisite. Presenting final projects as a shared class gallery is a subtle but significant justice move. It refuses the standard model of feedback from student to instructor, evaluated and returned, and instead positions student work as something the class community learns from together.
The reflection analyzes the rhetorical choices made in the final project (e.g., genre, audience, structure, tone, use of sources, and visual elements) as memes, images, graphs, and galleries. It also reflects on the student’s growth as a writer and researcher over the semester, offering specific examples of how research, writing, and revision practices have evolved. Students not only get to focus on the textual elements of their course but also innovate with respect to explaining and thinking about the process of acquisition.
A student who prompts an AI tool for an image representing their community and receives a stereotyped instance of representational injustice. A few students still prefer to submit textual reflections only, while many are enthused at the idea of being creative and bringing in their other skillsets to play while reminiscing about their research journey.
Teaching students to read images rhetorically, not just produce them, is a form of critical consciousness. We have had some robust discussions in class based on the outcomes different users with similar prompts receive, too.
