Available online at www.jmle.org The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s

This article describes a semester-long freshman learning community in which multimodal texts were used as primary texts along with traditional texts to support students ’ academic literacy skills. Analysis shows that an expository video created by students contains elements of academic literacies and qualities of multimodal texts. An unexpected finding was the presence of play within the process and product. These elements combine to create multimodal academic literacies. The author argues that multimodal academic literacies should be taught alongside traditional essayist forms in order to create rich learning opportunities