Complexity leadership theory provides a perspective on leadership that values, rather than avoids, the realities of a complex environment. As we are now fully part of an age of networks, facilitating leadership toward collective action means embracing a distributed model reliant on multiple modes of communication distributed over multiple nodes in complex networks. A complexity theory of leadership that is practiced within the context of multimodal authorship favors collective action over individual action, collaboration over centralization, and connectivity over isolation. It is in the power of multiple networks interacting and becoming a complex adaptive system that collective action leads to positive change.

Grounded in a multimodal turn in composition studies, this article reports findings from a quantitative taxonomy analysis of four visual rhetoric and multimodal composition textbooks. This analysis reveals that while theories privilege the production of visual and multimodal compositions, the practices encapsulated in these textbooks promote the consumption of such compositions more so than production. As a result, instructors will have to be mindful about their uptake of visual and multimodal textbooks if they want to teach in ways that are theoretically grounded and rhetorically rich.

This essay argues for approaches to composing that underscore the translingual and multimodal (or transmodal) character of texts and communicative practices. It maintains that learning about and working with different language varieties, cultural conventions, modes, and communicative technologies (digital as well as analog) helps to highlight processes of making, engaging, remixing, and transforming which, in turn, provide markedly different, and greatly enriched, points of entry for experiencing and appreciating the dynamic, highly distributed, translingual, multimodal, and embodied aspects of all communicative practice.

This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

Given the ubiquity of images and, implicitly, the habits of looking that influence the production of those images for both representation and communication, English studies requires a theory of Design that better accounts for dominant perceptual habits that function both to constrain acts of choice making and to restrict the repertoire of available resources. This article contributes to that agenda by focusing on one perceptual habit: the racialized gaze, a dominant cultural habit for perceiving race-related visual phenomena. Employing a fascinating take on the political cartoons of the nineteenth-century artist Thomas Nast as “racialized design,” Hum uses this work to complicate the idea of both design and gaze for students and teachers of visual rhetoric today. Specifically, she argues, among other points, that “the racialized gaze as Design provides a valuable theoretical framework for visual rhetoric, exegesis, and cultural analysis by directing our attention to how designers may unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions”

Benson examines three books—Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study—that contribute powerfully to the scholarly conversation about the changing face of composition by illustrating how the narrative of newness associated with multimodal and experimental work hides a long saga of negotiation between the traditional and the new in the field of composition.

This essay reimagines the way that listening is taught in the multimodal composition classroom. In contrast to listening to sonic content for meaning, the listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives.

The current interest in multimodal rhetoric was anticipated by Jacob Riis’s social documentary texts and presentations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the socialist urban critiques presented by Friedrich Engels, Riis’s work demonstrated profound ambivalence toward the city’s poor. While calling for reform of their living conditions, Riis subjected them to surveillance and depicted them as potential revolutionaries whom the upper classes should fear.

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical. In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays—the ways in which digital technology mediates, powerful interests influence, social agents negotiate, and multimodal texts communicate meaning.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

What do we want students to know, what do we want them to have after completing a series of courses in college English? College English ought to provide students with certain communicative that enable them to ana lyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Especially exciting is the expanding body of knowledge centered on visual, aural, and silent texts. Within the past five years, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of silence, and the rhetoric of listening have joined guides to analysis and production of printed texts (see, e.g., Faigley et al.; Glenn; Ratcliffe). This trend signals increasing recognition of the need to develop nondiscursive communication skills, that college English should engage itself in perfecting. I use the term skills unapologetically. Although many in English studies are uncomfortable with the idea that we should teach skills?claiming instead that we teach texts or au thors?I think it is just the right word. Ultimately what students remember about

The author uses the example of a text a student was not allowed to display on his course website to explore how and why institutional ideologies particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing—especially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law—render students’ multimedia compositions illegitimate. He suggests that the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutes of U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulation of students’ multimedia texts and inhibit students’ power as writers.

Reviewed are Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick; Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers; The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, edited by David Blakesley; and Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, by Bronwyn T. Williams.

Taking the reader on a stroll through the woods to look for the elusive and unclassifiable mushroom, this essay suggests that avant-gardes can present a challenge to our familiar modes of communication in the classroom. The author argues that a truly radical pedagogic practice, corresponding to the theoretical critiques offered by recent trends in the study of rhetoric and teaching, might forestall the real danger represented by teaching the avant-garde, namely that it be domesticated and its radical potential neutralized.

In recent years, as poststructuralist criticism has achieved a certain amount of acceptance and even dominance in some English departments, many scholars who are interested in bridging the gap between what they believe and publish professionally and what they teach have begun to construct pedagogical systems in which the analysis of texts, various entities that may fall within or without the customarily prescribed canon of literature, is the focus of study. Robert Scholes, in Textual Power, the third book in his critical trilogy, advocates bridging the gap between professional/critical stances and pedagogical practices, especially for those critics who espouse structural, semiotic, and poststructuralist practices. Scholes asserts that teachers of English have an obligation to teach their students about textuality: how texts function (both on a synchronic and diachronic level), how texts can be read (often in different ways and with different results), what informs texts (pretextual, contextual, and subtextual meaning always already inscribed in the text), how texts become part of readers' consciousness and spawn new texts (reading, interpreting, and critiquing), and how so much of what we refer to as culture (especially in a postmodern economy that is informationrather than industrial-based) is textual. Many authors, both directly and indirectly, have discussed the change from an industrial-based economy to an information-based economy as one of the characteristics of a postmodern era (see Huyssen; Jameson; Lyotard; Rowe). Reading (encountering a text), interpreting (creating a companion text), and critiquing (generating a dialectic or dialogic text) are essential acts for students as readers of literature, for students as writers, as well as for students as individuals. Scholes concisely summarizes the teacher's role in this process:

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