AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.

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.

Abstract The challenges that instructors of critical theory face today, particularly in global contexts, range from a public-health crisis, to a continued struggle for racial and economic justice, to the changing landscape of higher education. The solution we propose is twofold and involves decolonizing theory and making the classroom increasingly student centered.

Through a series of theses about the current academic landscape, this manifesto rejects the naturalized assumption that such phenomena as administrative bloat, student debt, segregation, and privatization in higher education are an inexorable fact of involuntary market forces. In closing, the authors encourage readers to transform higher education through collective action.

This piece discusses the use of sense of place as a focal point for studying literature to lead students to consider the complexity of the human relation to the physical world, the universal connections between people and landscapes, and the reciprocal impact of these relationships. The intent is to create fertile ground through the literature, class discussions, journal writing, and personal action for an environmental consciousness to emerge. Too, as students study literary characters’ interactions with places, they become more aware of their own developing relationships with their shared city and their place in, for many college students, their new community. The author presents these ideas from a pedagogical perspective that lays the foundation for such a literature course, including defining the concept “sense of place,” selecting texts, and creating assignments that encourage student involvement in the local community. The ideas covered are not limited to a literature course, however, and might be applied to writing classes and interdisciplinary disciplines.