AbstractThis article explores some pedagogical challenges and opportunities introduced by higher education's increased reliance on private learning management systems (LMS) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It theorizes LMS as an expression of neoliberalism and argues that critical literacy, as a method, should be done to (rather than simply through) LMS. Specifically, it examines two case studies of student interactions with the LMS during an asynchronous first-year writing course.

Abstract This article discusses how we have used undergraduate research (UR) to foster habits of mind associated with information literacy (IL). Our strategy is course based and involves students as potential contributors to the Graphic Narrative Database (GND), a digital work in progress. Presenting students with focused parameters for their research and with the prospect of an authentic audience for their writing, the assignment provides students with many opportunities to explore our complex information landscape as practitioners. Students deploy a wide array of strategies to gather and share information about a body of texts that are themselves richly multimodal.

The previous special issue of Pedagogy, “Undergraduate Research as a Future of English Studies,” featured institutional and pedagogical strategies for helping undergraduate students make original intellectual and creative contributions to the fields of literary studies, writing studies, and linguistics. Authors in this special issue described large-scale, multi-institutional strategies for promoting undergraduate research, and they used traditional definitions of undergraduate research from the Council on Undergraduate Research: students are mentored by faculty or more experienced researchers, they use research methods widely accepted in their discipline, they make at least modest contributions to their discipline, and they circulate their work beyond a classroom audience (Hakim 1998: 190). These characteristics are part of what marks undergraduate research as a high-impact practice, and this cluster of articles highlights how the spirit of undergraduate research—original, primary, and secondary research that aims to answer meaningful, authentic questions in a discipline—invigorates individual courses.Undergraduate research offers students and institutions clear benefits around success and retention: students who participate have higher retention rates, grade point averages, and graduation rates (Bowman and Holmes 2018). It further promotes student learning as students make demonstrated gains in independent critical thinking, the ability to integrate theory and practice, and oral and written communication. The articles in this cluster highlight the ways in which course-based undergraduate research can also foster learning gains in information literacy, particularly the information literacy practices required in English studies. Information literacy is often associated with first-year writing courses, but these courses are simply the beginning. Information literacy should extend vertically through undergraduate majors, and it can be effectively paired with undergraduate research experiences.The authors in this cluster demonstrate how novel, course-based undergraduate research experiences can foster growth in information literacy. First, Angela Laflen and Moira Fitzgibbons, a composition professor and a medieval literature professor, describe how a multimodal, digital research project—the Graphic Narrative Database—gives students an authentic context in which to develop writing, literary analysis, and information literacy skills. Second, Laci Mattison and Rachel Tait-Ripperdan, a literature professor and an academic librarian, share their work in the digital archives with the Journals of Queen Victoria. By working with this archive, students deepened both their knowledge of Victorian culture and their primary research skills, including the skills needed to navigate an extensive digital archive. And finally, Michael Gutierrez and Sarah Singer argue for the value of primary and secondary research in the creative writing classroom, demonstrating how an autoethnography assignment is deepened with attention to information literacy. At Pedagogy, we hope this cluster provides readers with examples of innovative, course-based undergraduate research projects that can be adapted to multiple contexts and that promote information literacy in the undergraduate English curriculum.

AbstractThis article describes the implementation of and assessment findings for a digital archival assignment in the 3000-level Victorian Literature and Culture course at Florida Gulf Coast University. The assignment utilized ProQuest's database, Queen Victoria's Journals, which comprises the extant journals of Queen Victoria, and demonstrated the value of primary historical research and digital archives in enhancing student content knowledge, information literacy, and critical thinking.

AbstractThis article addresses the interrelationship among writing, reading, and information literacy (WRIL) by discussing a collaborative assessment project that generated a criteria map focused on process, enactment, engagement, and attribution. The authors connect this map to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education but critique the failure of these frameworks to account for the importance of reading. In emphasizing WRIL for students, the authors contend that practitioners must help students understand WRIL practices as dynamic, developing, and complex, and they provide pedagogical suggestions for assigning reference materials, reading as researchers, and sharing visualization tools.

This article names microaggressions as a rhetorical and pedagogical phenomenon. To make the case for rhetorical and pedagogical intervention, the authors define and trace microaggressions in literature from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies; share cross-disciplinary understandings of microaggressions; and offer illustrations from sites of research, teaching, and service.

This article describes an assignment that involves students in an exploration of the rhetorical practices common in Facebook, making use of rhetorical savvy that they have—but generally are not aware of—to teach the often-challenging skill of rhetorical analysis. The class discusses articles about Facebook use and redefines traditional Aristotelian rhetorical concepts in the context of the visually rich and collage-like texts that are Facebook profiles. Students take their cues from an anthropologist's analysis of identity representation on dorm doors to explore rhetorical practices of exaggeration also discernable in Facebook profiles. Students and teacher note features from Facebook pages that suggest tendencies to be popular versus being an individual or signs of addiction to the networking tool. This assignment that brings academic analysis to bear on non-academic literacy practices like the construction of Facebook profiles encourages students to reflect critically on daily activities that involve more complex rhetorical skills than they might otherwise notice. In addition to making students' often-tacit rhetorical knowledge explicit, breaking down the usual division between school and non-school rhetorics in this exploration of Facebook helps to educate teachers about their students' digital literacy practices.

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies—inflected by feminist research, new literacy studies, critical theory, and digital media studies—provide teacher-scholars a promising set of strategies for conducting research and for representing students' work and our own scholarship in digital contexts.