Research to Story is our guiding framework for inquiry and research-based communication. It approaches media projects as course-level designs that connect research, storytelling, and production as interconnected modes of work. Research grounds the work in questions and evidence, story organizes interpretation and audience awareness, and production provides compositional practice within the constraints of a medium. As students move among these modes, production choices shape interpretation, and technical fluency grows alongside conceptual understanding.
Research, Story, Production: Distinct but Interconnected Phases
When students struggle with multimodal assignments, the instinct is to look for better tools or better tutorials. But the breakdown usually happens earlier — in the gap between strong research and knowing how to communicate it through a medium. Students arrive at production having done substantial thinking, without enough practice putting that thinking into a form an audience can move through. The gap is rhetorical, and rhetoric is something faculty already know how to teach.
Research to Story is a framework for addressing that gap. It offers faculty a shared vocabulary for the intellectual work that happens when students move between research, story, and production — and a set of course-level touchpoints, small adjustments rather than overhauls, that help students develop the habits of mind that make media-based work intellectually productive. Faculty already teach argumentation, evidence, and audience. Research to Story extends those familiar practices into a new medium
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Research as Discovery
Inquiry & Discovery: Students move from gathering information to shaping inquiry. In this phase, research becomes an active process of questioning, noticing patterns, and finding stories within evidence
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Story as Understanding
Structure & Meaning: Students organize their ideas into meaning. Story development connects research to audience, helping students clarify significance and experiment with how structure shapes understanding.
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Production as Exploration
Making & Revision: Production practices that shape inquiry and interpretation. Through production, they translate ideas into sound and image and learn how technical choices reveal, refine, and sometimes even reshape understanding.
Flexible Pathways for Integrating Multimedia
Every course develops its own rhythm for research, reflection, and communication. Media assignments fit best when they support that rhythm and create openings for inquiry, experimentation, and revision. Faculty incorporate these projects in many ways, from long-form work across a semester to short exploratory activities.
At Reeder, we collaborate with you to shape an approach that aligns with your goals, your timeline, and your teaching style. Some courses build a gradual sequence; others focus on a single assignment or early skill-building moments that spark curiosity. All approaches benefit from intentional openings for students to explore research, story, and production together.
Timelines & Implementation
- Rhythms of Inquiry Across the Semester
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Courses often follow a seasonal flow that begins with early research, moves into meaning-making, and opens into production and revision. These dimensions overlap and circle back as students refine questions, test structures, and explore how ideas take shape through making. These moments do not necessarily unfold as steps on a conveyor belt. They operate as recurring spaces of inquiry that students revisit as ideas mature.
Research in Motion
Students collaborate with librarians to develop inquiry questions, evaluate sources, and build foundations that will continue to evolve. Early discoveries often return in later drafts and design choices.
Story Development and Framing
Students organize ideas for an audience, explore structures, and refine interpretations. This work frequently prompts new questions and renewed attention to sources, evidence, and meaning.
Production and Reflection
Students shape sound, image, and pacing into communicable form. Each design decision invites reflection on how research, narrative, and method stay connected.
- Implementation Models
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Extended Integration
Media work appears throughout the semester. Students build research fluency, narrative awareness, and production practices in recurring moments, allowing ideas to develop across multiple drafts and modes of expression.
Assignment-Centered Integration
Support clusters around one significant multimodal assignment. Together we identify key touchpoints—framing discussions, model analysis, brief production exercises—that help students ground their work in research and communicate with intention.
Exploratory Integration
Small, low-stakes activities give students space to try tools, test ideas, and reflect on how medium shapes meaning. These lightweight engagements create familiarity and confidence while supporting your course’s existing structure.
Custom Combinations
Many faculty blend elements from all three approaches, drawing on research support, story workshops, and production practice as needed. We help map these components onto your syllabus so they reinforce your goals without adding unnecessary load.
- What We’ve Learned Along the Way
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After years of working closely with students on podcasting, video essays, and other research-based media projects, we’ve noticed a few recurring patterns that shape how—and how well—students learn. We share these observations not as rules, but as reflections from supporting projects as they unfold.
- How It’s Made Shapes What It Means
It’s common to treat research, argument, and storytelling as separate from the act of making. But students think more deeply when they experience form as part of the inquiry itself. Editing, sequencing, pacing, and the use of sound or images are not just technical steps; they are ways of interpreting evidence and shaping meaning. When students connect these choices to their research questions and organizing ideas, their thinking becomes more precise and more nuanced. - Familiar Tools Don’t Equal Scholarly Readiness
Comfort with everyday media platforms doesn’t automatically prepare students for research-based communication. Students benefit from structured opportunities to move from familiarity to intentional use where tools are chosen and used in response to questions, audiences, and interpretive goals rather than convenience. - When Work Feels Messy, the Course Design Is Often Doing Its Job
Media projects rarely unfold in a straight line. Light scaffolding, such as example analysis, early exploratory tasks, checkpoints, and guided reflection gives students the structure they need to work through uncertainty. These moments are not detours from learning; they are often where synthesis happens. - Scaffolding Shapes What You Can Fairly Assess
Students demonstrate what they have had time and space to practice. Early encounters with media, opportunities to revise, and moments to reflect on decisions strengthen both the process and the final work. Assessment becomes more meaningful when it recognizes not just polish, but the thinking that developed along the way. - Finding the Right Level of Partnership
Some instructors prefer to lead media work independently; others collaborate more closely with librarians and instructional designers. We support both approaches and can help think through milestones, learning goals, and ways to integrate media as part of a broader inquiry-driven course design.
- How It’s Made Shapes What It Means