By Taylor J. Wyatt. Any discussion about multimodal composition inevitably invites the question: “What counts as writing?” This question of what “counts” often reveals an underlying assumption that multimodality lacks adequate academic rigor. “What counts as writing” leads to further considerations, such as identifying pedagogical strategies to help students expand their knowledge in new writing contexts and genres. In their 2016 edited collection, Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore define transfer “as the ability to repurpose or transform prior knowledge for a new context” (370). As they offer their definition of transfer, Anson and Moore note the complexity of the term and write, “for many scholars transfer functions as an umbrella term, encompassing an array of theories about the phenomenon” (370). Kara Poe Alexander, Matthew Davis, Lilian W. Mina, and Ryan P. Shepherd’s edited collection Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer considers writing transfer and what counts as writing within a multimodal context.

Discourse-based interviews (DBIs) uncover tacit knowledge within written composing processes. Existing visual research methodologies offer tools for a necessary expansion of DBI to the study of tacit knowledge in visual and multimodal texts. This article outlines a feminist application of eye tracking as a visual research method used in combination with stimulated recall interviews to study tacit knowledge within college students’ reading practices of comic books. Study participants read excerpts from two female superhero comics while eye tracking equipment recorded their eye movements. In a later interview, participants watched video clips of their recorded eye movements overlaid on the comic book excerpts and reconstructed their reading processes. This article summarizes major findings from the study, including impacts of rhetorical genre expertise, gender, and comics culture on participants’ reading practices. The study demonstrates that eye tracking combined with stimulated recall interviews uncovered tacit knowledge that participants accessed as they read comics.

This main argument this article makes is that the field of Rhetoric and Composition must expand our current multimodal framework to account for a sixth mode: the multilingual mode. Understood as the purposeful combination of multiple languages within a single composition, the multilingual mode has two distinct benefits: it allows us to more fully support multilingual students’ rhetorical abilities, and it also supports the work of antiracism in the college writing classroom by challenging the racism embedded in our current five-mode framework. To show potential enactments of the multilingual mode, this article spotlights three student projects along with student reflections on their work.

This article explores the range and frequency of First-Year Writing students’ emotional responses towards a project requiring multimodal composing and distribution of their work to an online public audience prior to and after completing the assignment. I analyzed the results using Driscoll and Powell’s emotion categories (generative, disruptive, and circumstantial) and found that students experienced a variety of emotional responses towards both multimodal composing and sharing online, including anxiety, excitement, and fear. I discuss how these findings challenge some assumptions related to writing instructors’ perceptions of post-Millennial students’ comfort with and interest in multimodal composing and writing for online audiences. The article concludes by offering pedagogical suggestions for instructors interested in critically integrating this type of digital assignment.

This case study of students enrolled in a composition course at a large public university examines multilingual students’ application of multimodal composition practices to writing assignments that emphasize delivery and circulation. Assignments in which students remediate or translate a text in one genre or medium into another are widely used to foster transfer of writing knowledge from classrooms to public discourse. Remixing may be especially useful for multilingual writers by allowing them to draw on translingual meaning-making strategies. However, such assignments must be framed in ways that make explicit the rhetorical implications of how remediated or translated texts are taken up and circulated within larger ecologies and suggest how uptake can be measured and assessed to be useful. This article draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies and Translingualism to address this issue in Multimodal Composition by outlining a pedagogical approach that emphasizes delivery and measuring uptake.

This article proposes a model for collaboration between composition instructors and instructional librarians to promote visual literacy instruction in first-year writing courses. While the creation of visual content is essential to digital composing technologies, it often remains underutilized as a tool for writing development in first-year curricula. Drawing from complementary threshold concepts outlined in composition scholarship and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy , we demonstrate how librarians and writing instructors can engage in collaborative instruction to bridge gaps between theory and practice and leverage existing institutional expertise to support multimodal instruction in first-year writing.

This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional (Crenshaw; Martinez) and interdependent (Jung; Wheeler) approaches that put language diversity and disability in conversation (Cioè-Peña). Each of us shares two pedagogical examples that consider language diversity/difference and embodied diversity/difference as unified concepts. Our pedagogical examples include projects related to multimodal and digital rhetoric, multilingual/multimodal community engagement, reflecting on communication differences, and analyzing multimodal/multilingual communication in practice. Through what we call intersectional, interdependent approaches to accessibility in writing classrooms, students and teachers can honor the multitude of valuable communication practices that students engage in within and beyond the English writing classroom.

This program profile describes a globally focused cocurricular writing program led by faculty, staff, and graduate students from academic affairs and student affairs. Revisiting the program’s first two years, the authors (three graduate students and a faculty member) assert that writing-oriented learning activities within Texas Christian University’s (TCU) GlobalEX program were productively positioned to enable students to engage with other cultures and hone skills for becoming intercultural navigators. Drawing on a similar approach from Fernando Sánchez and Daniel Kenzie to apply Michel de Certeau’s ideas about tactics in cultural work, our program profile identifies important features shaped by this program’s cocurricular context that can be productively drawn upon both in non-course contexts and in curricular spaces. These include writing reflectively within flexible structures arranged to support learning through progressive stages; capitalizing on multimodal composing genres conducive to collaboration; and situating writing in public contexts without the individual pressure of grades.

In this article, I explore normative assumptions regarding multimodality from the perspective of disability studies, and focus particularly on how coherence and wholeness work in disciplinary conversations and professional statements. I offer a reading of the hybrid graphic-written text The Ride Together as a way to resist these normative impulses and to explore a different kind of wholeness at work in the interaction between text and image. I argue for appreciating the rhetorical strategy of dis-closure, which I define as occurring when disability frustrates the normative expectations of multimodal, compositional, and narrative closure in productive and generative ways. I analyze multimodal collaboration and revision in The Ride Together , arguing that insights from comics studies, together with an appreciation of dis-closure, present alternatives to the limiting disciplinary focus on coherence and wholeness.

Informed by my embodiment as a Deaf instructor asking hearing students to challenge captioning conventions, this article shows how hearing composers can reimagine the design of their captioned videos, and appreciate students’ embodied responses to new rhetorical situations. The embodied methodology and methods in this article incorporate embodied differences and are directly influenced by the fields of disability studies, cultural rhetorics, and embodiment. This article foregrounds students’ embodied responses—their individual reactions to the videos and activities—in the form of their reflective letters on the process of designing and analyzing videos with dynamic visual text, or captions that move around the screen in interaction with other modes of communication. In addition to discussing their written responses and the skills they developed, I assess their group videos to show how student composers interpret the process of infusing captions with meaning.

With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future.

Scholarship on metacognition in the composition classroom shows how asking students to create reflective texts can help cue, analyze, and assess transfer. By following the composition processes of 13 students doing a remixing assignment, this project examines how genre mediates reflection. I use Rhetorical Genre Studies’ conception of uptake—focusing on the selection process of choosing a genre and the eventual genre production—to examine students’ reflective practice within this assignment. Tracing the students’ uptake selection processes and comparing them to what students reflect about in their reflective texts reveals how reflection is mediated through genre. I argue that reflective practice should take place through a variety of genres throughout the composition process, rather than just retrospectively on the finished product. Asking students to do multi-genred reflective writing throughout the composition process could allow students to map their uptake selection processes more effectively when moving across multimodal genres.

As multimodal writing continues to shift and expand in the era of Big Data, writing studies must confront the new challenges and possibilities emerging from data mining, data visualization, and data-driven arguments. Often collected under the broad banner of data literacy , students’ experiences of data visualization and data-driven arguments are far more diverse than the phrase data literacy suggests. Whether it is the quantitative rhetoric of “likes” in entertainment media, the mapping of social sentiment on cable news, the use of statistical predictions in political elections, or the pervasiveness of the algorithmic phrase “this is trending,” data-driven arguments and their accompanying visualizations are now a prevalent form of multimodal writing. Students need to understand how to read data-driven arguments, and, of equal importance, produce such arguments themselves. In Writing through Big Data, a newly developed writing course, students confront Big Data’s political and ethical concerns head-on (surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic filtering) by collecting social network data and producing their own data-driven arguments.

Multimodal pedagogy is increasingly accepted among composition scholars. However, putting such pedagogy into practice presents significant challenges. In this profile of Washington State University’s first-year composition program, we suggest a multi-vocal and multi-theoretical approach to addressing the challenges of multimodal pedagogy. Patricia Ericsson, the director of composition, illustrates how theories of agency are central to the integration of multimodality. Elizabeth Sue Edwards, a graduate teaching assistant, explores negotiating departmental standards and implementing multimodal assignments. Tialitha Michelle Macklin, also a graduate teaching assistant, discusses her journey from rejecting multimodal assignments to embracing them as an integral element of her pedagogy. And Leeann Downing Hunter, a non-tenure-track faculty member, approaches the challenge through the lens of adaptability. We believe that this multi-vocal approach to building a multimodal composition program offers: (1) a foundation for other writing programs to adapt and build upon; (2) an alternative to traditional approaches that rely on single theories and single leaders; and (3) a reconstitution of how the university works, integrating stakeholder voices from administrators to students themselves.

Comics—both digital and print—increasingly make their way to the classroom. Scholars in the field have illustrated the pedagogical value of comics, but there remains little discussion as of yet about how comics can inform critical literacy, a necessary skill for twenty-first-century communication. Here the authors discuss an approach to first-year composition that argues for using comics, like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home , as an avenue for grappling with critical literacy. This classroom activity was a part of a larger assignment sequence where students were asked to compose web-based literature reviews that incorporated multimodality. These literature reviews challenged students to incorporate multiple viewpoints into their essays, and critically discussing comics proved to be an effective method for fostering this critical literacy.

In addition to teaching research and writing skills, First-Year Composition classes are well situated to help students develop strategies for managing stress and increasing well-being. I describe an assignment sequence in which students interview others from three generations about topics related to happiness and well-being, analyze shared transcripts, and present their findings in two genres. Beyond providing instruction in research methods, academic writing, and multimodal composing for non-academic audiences, this sequence supports the five elements of authentic well-being outlined by positive psychologist Martin Seligman: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and accomplishment. These assignments and related course content foster emotional literacy by prompting students to approach happiness and well-being as academic subjects and to develop practical strategies for implementing what they’ve learned.

This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher examines connections between students’ linguistic repertoires and their respective approaches to multimodal composition. Students at both universities took composition courses that incorporate rhetorical genre studies approaches to teaching writing in conventional print and multimodal forms. Findings suggest L2 students exhibit advanced expertise and rhetorical sensitivity when layering meaning through multimodal composition. This expertise comes in part from L2 students’ experiences combining and crossing various modes when they cannot exclusively rely on words to communicate in English. Through this evidence, the researcher argues the translingual practices of L2 students can bridge connections and help develop pedagogical applications of multimodality and RGS, primarily by helping writing instructors teach genres as fluid and socially situated. In addition, the researcher presents a methodology for analyzing the embodied practices of composition students, which can further expand how genres are theorized and taught in composition courses.

With distance education on the rise, a new program at the University of New Mexico provides an innovative way to teach first-year composition in a fully online format. The program, called eComp (short for Electronic Composition), insists that instructors receive formal and educational training before working in the model. In addition, the curriculum taught within the first-year writing courses attends to multimodal literacies, and students receive help with their drafts from various sources, including instructional assistants who are tutors embedded in each course shell. This profile describes the program, including the scholarship that informed its design, the pilot project, and results from a small-scale assessment. Furthermore, we discuss future expansion of the program. This program description can serve as a model—in whole or in part—for other English departments when structuring a successful, integrative online program that emphasizes teacher training and multimodal literacies.

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the “language” of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal compositions. The second section, montage style editing, as it appears in The Odessa Steps Sequence from Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, establishes that an awareness of “style” can bridge the gap between print and new media literacy. The third section outlines one advanced writing assignment called a “montage tap essay” in which students use a free online platform called Tapestry to create an interactive essay that ostensibly takes into consideration the particular cinematic affordances of editing, design, and writing.

Recent explorations position multimodality as a largely curricular practice wherein the body typically is not figured as a potential mode of meaning making.  Such a projection not only fails to acknowledge extracurricular uses of such a rhetoric but also fails to acknowledge the role of the body in and especially for composing.  In hopes of countering this limited yet common understanding of multimodality, I consider an Auburn University 2004 defensive football play and sketch a picture of how embodied multimodality figures heavily in the literate activity surrounding college football. I end with a brief word on how Gunther Kress’s theory of multimodality encompassing the material and the bodily—two important concepts at play when examining football as literate activity—informs classroom practice through paving the way for embodied multimodal pedagogies.  Ultimately, I hold that an analysis of extracurricular embodied multimodality in college football invites student-athletes to hone a beneficial form of second-nature embodied rhetoric absent in curricular multimodality.

A multiliteracies pedagogy has renewed our interest in materiality, or how the physical text interacts with the author’s choices and the context to contribute to the message, yet little attention has been paid to materiality in analog texts, such as the scrapbook, even though this medium contains affordances (capabilities and limitations) that encourage active engagement with the materiality of composition. This essay demonstrates the pedagogical value of the scrapbook for how it encourages student composers to select, appropriate, and redesign external cover materials to communicate the message inside the book and how it emphasizes the haptic sense (touch). In short, the scrapbook assignment is pedagogically important because it teaches students the concept of affordances and demonstrates to them how materiality impacts design, composition, and rhetorical choices; it also provides a low-tech, low-stakes entry into multimodal composing and reflexivity on the rhetorical decision-making process.

This article addresses two central research questions: (1) Are there possible detrimental implications to teaching multimodal composition in first-year composition? (2) If so, what is pedagogy’s role in mediating these outcomes? Guided by these questions and focused on the responses of eighty seven first-year composition students, a mixed-methods research approach is engaged through surveys, pre/post-semester questionnaire data, transcribed interviews, and writing-about-writing essays. Uncovering the 39.6% of students who—through this research—are discovered to feel constrained rather than liberated by technology and who believe that technology amplifies their place in the literacy hierarchy, this article articulates the identity politics inside the multimodal composition classroom and introduces the term “hypermediated fractures” into the pedagogical conversations surrounding feminist pedagogy and the teaching of digital literacies in first-year composition.