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.

To illustrate how genre pedagogy and public writing pedagogy can inform one another, this program profile describes the second-semester composition course at University of North Dakota, ENGL 130: College Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences. In this course, genre works as a rhetorical bridge across an interlinked sequence of research, professional, and public writing assignments focused on a contemporary topic of public interest. The course maintains a public orientation throughout: as a simulated genre system, the course constitutes a protopublic, or a rhetorical space in which students can learn about public debates, rehearse public discourses, and prepare for future performances of public genres with rhetorical awareness in their repertoire.

Of the 40% of internet users who have faced harassment online, young adults, women, and racial minorities are especially vulnerable, experiencing more severe harassment and experiencing it more often. This article attempts to reconcile the increasingly urgent calls for students to compose in public spaces online with the reality of potential harassment. Compositionists should avoid relying on a Habermasian understanding of the public sphere and instead embrace a political, ecological approach to public writing that recognizes publics as the result of the interactions between multiple texts and actors, and that attends to the ways in which power relations alternately shape, constrain, and enable those texts and actors. This model equips students with a more sophisticated framework for understanding internet publics, and will ultimately empower them to make informed rhetorical choices about which public networks to enter, ensuring not just more effective rhetorical action but safer online experiences.

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.

This multimedia article focuses on my experience as a professor working on a campus adjacent to Ferguson, Missouri. I discuss the ways that Ferguson and Black Lives Matter pushed me to intentionally and meaningfully connect my teaching, research, and the local community. Through narrative, video and audio excerpts and analysis of conversations with Ferguson community members, and pedagogical reflection, I argue for an understanding of public rhetoric and writing that is more inclusive of listening, archives, collectivity, and social justice. I also highlight the importance of building rhetorical theory alongside public rhetors in local communities, helping students understand that the rhetorical tradition is far from a historical relic. Instead, it is a work-in-progress, living and breathing all around them.

In this interview, Paula Mathieu explores the rhetorical tactics and contemplative practices necessary to cultivate hope in a period of political tumult. Drawing on her scholarship on the “public turn” in Composition Studies, a term she gave us in her vital Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition , Mathieu discusses tactics and strategies for teaching public writing and supporting the work of public writing teachers at a time when community partnerships and service learning are more susceptible to critique in political discourse. Mathieu traces out a synthesis between mindfulness and public engagement and underlines the importance of seeing the contemplative as productive and reflective of public engagement.

In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?,” Wells discusses the possibilities public writing instruction holds for cultivating students’ public agency, while also exploring the boundaries between what can and cannot be accomplished in the public writing classroom.