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tags: mdf-report
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# Alex Braslavsky: Media & Design Fellow in Slavic


Media & Design Fellows provide direct support to specific courses, helping students develop and complete multimodal assignments. MDFs also host workshops in multimodal communication, multimodal storytelling, and presentation techniques. They also provide general support to their departments by developing resources and hosting events that support multimodal scholarship.

In this report, you can read about:
* The **training with the Learning Lab** Alex did to get ready to support projects in Slavic
* The **courses** Alex supported this term
* The **departmental support** Alex provided this term

## Learning Lab Training


During MDF orientation in August and throughout the bi-weekly fall MDF meetings, Alex learned:
* how to **design activities, prototype assignments, and create resources** that help students in the particular courses they are supporting.
* a set of **multimodal pedagogy and instructional design best practices** and ways of connecting it to their discipline
* **the affordances of different media** and what students gain, intellectually and analytically, by engaging with those media forms

To get ready to support Slavic courses, the **tools** that Alex specialized in were:
* **digital audio workstations** (DAWs) like GarageBand, a program that is used to edit podcasts
* **microphones**, including dynamic mics, condenser mics, and cardioid mics, as a way of understanding their different audio qualities
* **Final Cut Pro**, a video editing tool used for video essays
* **AI tools** including custom GPTs and image generators like Fluxus
* **Canva**, a web-based graphic design and layout tool

## Course Support

### Slavic 189 The Other Russia: Twenty-First Century Films, Fictions, States of Mind

In this course, students created podcasts. Alex supported this course by:

- Holding a podcasting **workshop** that introduced students to the form and helped them think conceptually about the different components that comprised a podcast. These introductory workshops helped students grasp the form’s key moves–for example, in a podcast, a music bed was not just ornamental but actually gave an affective structure to the listening experience and developed in complexity as the podcast narrative unfolded (and itself became more complex).
- Creating a podcasting **resource** that students could refer to as they completed the assignment. Asynchronous resources that guided students through the process of capturing, editing, and exporting audio ensured that students could get support during the production process, which often took place outside of class time.

### Slavic 132: Russia’s Golden Age

In this course, students created multimodal interpretations of the texts they studied. Alex supported this course by:

- Helping the course team **design the assignment guidelines** and crafting rationales for different multimodal forms that helped students make intentional choices about the form(s) they used. Alex also provided recommendations about the tools and software that students could access through the University to make projects in these different forms.
- Offering **consultations** for students as they worked on these final creative projects.
- Creating a **resource** about possible uses of AI, since this was an option for the final creative project. Alex’s AI resource overviewed some of the moves one might make in working with AI in the context of a course about Russia’s Golden Age writers, primarily working in Harvard’s ChatGPT Edu space.

### FYSEMR 65P: Anton Chekhov: Stories, Plays, Productions, Films

In this course, students created multimodal interpretations of the texts they studied. Alex supported this course by:

- Helping the course team **design the assignment guidelines** and crafting rationales for different multimodal forms that helped students make intentional choices about the form(s) they used. Alex also provided recommendations about the tools and software that students could access through the University to make projects in these different forms.
- Offering **consultations** for students as they worked on these final creative projects.

## Department Support
Media & Design Fellows provide general support to their departments by developing resources and hosting events that support multimodal scholarship.

### Graphic design for department courses
Alex designed posters for some of the department's Spring 2025 courses, including:
* Modernisms: Reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace
* Ukrainian, Soviet, European
* Polish Language Courses
* Fourth-Year Russian: Russian Media and Popular Culture
* Czech Language Courses
* Ukrainian Language Courses