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tags: report
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# Laura Pérez Muñoz: Media & Design Fellow in RLL


Media & Design Fellows support innovative course development, partnering with faculty and Learning Lab staff to design a variety of digital tools, course materials and content, and assignments for undergraduate courses and their departments. MDFs design interactive, technically complex learning experiences for students that help them grasp the affordances of different media, and they develop workshops and other forms of guidance that help students succeed in using new media to convey their ideas and demonstrate subject-matter expertise.

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

## Learning Lab Training

### Labs/Working Groups

To prepare to support courses and to develop their multimodal pedagogy, MDFs join a "lab". In these labs, MDFs learn the media skills that they need to complete their projects. They undertake an initial learning project that teaches them the core competencies required for their departmental projects.

In support of their projects, Laura teamed up with both avLab and graphicsLab. In the former lab, Laura learned the basics of video editing in industry-standard software like Premiere Pro, before learning more advanced features like captioning, automated transcription, and graphics. In graphicsLab, Laura learned fundamental graphic design principles (like proximity, color, alignment, repetition) and learned about accessible graphic design practices.

### Pedagogical Training

Throughout the year, MDFs develop their multimodal pedagogy, learning during orientation and at biweekly MDF meetings:
* how to design activities, prototype assignments, and create resources that help students in the particular courses they are supporting.
* how to develop their own style of multimodal pedagogy as they think through the specific media that align with their discipline’s methods and means of analyzing data.
* the affordances of different media and what students gain, intellectually and analytically, by engaging with those media forms


## Course Support

Laura helped design and facilitate workshops in RLL courses where students made podcasts and video essays. Laura's workshops helped students learn how to make strategic choices about every formal element in each of these two forms. In the podcast zone, Laura helped students learn how to develop interview questions that would bring about rich, engaging conversations suitable to a podcast. Laura's support of video essay workshops introduced students to the role that camera movement plays in developing a cinematic narrative, as well as the different rhetorical effects that shot composition and lighting can have in a film. The workshops Laura supported in the a/v realm included:
* French 10: Portfolio Videos Workshop
* French 30: Podcasting Workshop
* French 40: Filmmaking Workshop
* Portuguese 10: Propaganda Video Workshop
* Portuguese 30: Video Workshop

## Department Support

### Subtitling Teaching Demonstration Videos
The Language Program in RLL shares teaching demonstration videos in a range of romance langauges as a way of allowing a broad community of language teachers to learn from one another's teaching. In support of this project, Laura developed a video editing workflow to transcribe and subtitle these videos. Laura used Adobe Premiere's automated video editing tool, deploying this emergent AI technology toward the end of subtitling these videos efficiently. Reflecting on this project, Laura remarked on how much the videos helped them when they were first TF'ing at Harvard: "It's very intimidating to teach, and these videos, which are teaching examples, make teaching accessible, less intimidating. You actually can get ideas for activities from the videos as well. This is actually really important, especially in the beginner Spanish or beginner languages."

### Teaching Resources Canvas
In collaboration with the RLL Pedagogy Fellows, Laura is helping to compile and organize teaching resources for the language program's teaching website. Laura is redesigning the layout of the Canvas site so that it would be more easily navigable for users.

### Poster Design for Departmental Event Promotion
In support of department events, Laura created promotional posters. Laura learned graphic design principles that enabled them to design posters that were clear, engaging, and contained the relevant event details. Laura learned how to communicate through short form text and visual design.