In this article, the authors engage the theoretical lens of multimodality in rethinking the practices and processes of composing in classrooms. Specifically, they focus on how learning new composing practices led some fifth-grade students to author new literate identities—what they call authorial stances—in their classroom community. Their analysis adds to the current research on the production and analysis of multimodal texts through an analysis of the interrelationships between multimodal composing processes and the development of literate identities. They found that by extending the composing process beyond print modalities students’ composing shifted in significant ways to reflect the circulating nature of literacies and texts and increased the modes of participation and engagement within the classroom curriculum.These findings are based on an ethnographic study of a multimodal storytelling project in a fifth-grade urban classroom.

Abstract This article explores the challenges and opportunities that the rising numbers of students with disabilities and the changing definition of disability pose to technical communication teachers and researchers. Specifically, in a teacher-researcher study that combines methods from disability studies, I report on the effectiveness of multimodal and universal design approaches to more comprehensively address disability and accessibility in the classroom and to revise traditional impairment-specific approaches to disability in technical communication. Notes 1. CitationCharlton (1998), in Nothing About Us Without Us, recalls hearing this slogan in South Africa in 1993 from two separate leaders of Disabled People of South Africa, Michael Masutha and William Rowland, and he writes, “The slogan's power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (p. 3). 2. Other principles include guidelines for equitable use, varieties of perceptible information, and appropriate size and space for approach and use. See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html for quoted guidelines. 3. CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It is a challenge-response test that usually visually distorts and warps letters, assuming that a human can decode the letters but a computer cannot. 4. For details on the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility, see CitationThatcher et al. (2006), pp. 26–28. Chapter 1, “Understanding Web Accessibility,” is useful for students to read and discuss during this segment of the class. 5. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by CitationThatcher et al. (2006) is also a useful resource for students to consult, particularly Chapter 1.

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a site of community-based publishing, finding both limitations and potential in the survival-driven, print-based, and hyperlocal character of street paper media. Discussing an emerging digital platform for participatory blogging among homeless and low-income street paper vendors, the author suggests how a model of Web-based, multimodal, and interactive communication might work to extend the community literacy practices of the street paper movement.

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new opportunities to organize, communicate, and campaign utilizing these new rhetorical networks. I argue for a notion of “viral advocacy” for organizing in new digital spaces. Based on an on-going project using social media in my faculty union’s advocacy work, I demonstrate some possibilities for using social media for rhetorical advocacy.

This article argues that tracing multimodal-multilingual literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces is key to moving composition into the twenty-first century. Key tothis remixing of the field is a situated framework that locates multimodal-multilingual activities in wider genre, cultural, national, and global ecologies.

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

The Microreview feature is intended to present a series of condensed reviews of online work by an invited scholar. By providing an informed perspective chosen by the reviewer, readers can not only find out about this type of online work, but begin to understand how the online work may be relevant to their own scholarly and teaching practices.

Being prepared with accurate, credible, and timely information during a disaster can help individuals make informed decisions about taking appropriate actions. Unfortunately, many people have difficulty understanding health and risk-related resources. This exploratory, mixed methods study assessed disaster information-seeking behaviors and comprehension of public health disaster preparedness resources by individuals at an adult literacy center. A convenience pilot sample of 20 adult learners (mean age: 53.1) was recruited. Health literacy was assessed using Newest Vital Sign (NVS) and modified Cloze (multiple choice) tests on biological terrorism and avian influenza information. In-person interviews were conducted to determine participants’ knowledge, perceptions, and information needs about disasters. Thematic analysis of interviews was conducted using NVivo7. Mean NVS was 3.11/6.00 implying limited health literacy. Mean Cloze scores revealed marginal disaster comprehension (avian flu: .46/1.00; biological terrorism: .48/1.00). Over half of participants with inadequate Cloze comprehension self-rated their understanding as “good.” Key themes emerging from interviews were: multiple perceptions about disasters, limited access to preparedness resources, need for visuals and plain language information, and importance of knowing where to go during a disaster. Study findings advocate for multimedia, plain language, and visual communication to influence adult learners’ literacy practices and self-efficacy in interpreting instructions and acting appropriately in preparing for and responding to disasters.

This essay illustrates why compositionists should conceive of multimodal writing assignments as having wide-ranging and forward-thinking parameters, in order to invite the greatest possible range of student responses; it also suggests the directions we should take when evaluating such work.

First-year composition students engage with visual rhetoric via interpretation and analysis through a trip to a local art museum for the first essay assignment and through an exploration of photography for the second essay assignment.

Doug Hesse has written a commentary on “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” by Cynthia L. Selfe, which appeared in College Composition and Communication 60.4 (June 2009): 616–63. The full text of the original article is available at the CCC website: www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc.

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.

Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they “see” in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals.

This article documents a novel yet theory-informed process of preparing research reports designed for government officials who are concerned with creating adult-literacy policy. The authors use cartoons that include verbatim dialogue from the transcripts of interviews with research participants with low functional literacy. This dialogue, which depicts positive messages about the participants’ moral character, strengths, and resilience, is set against photographic backdrops of the participants’ lived environment to give a sense of real people in a real place. Inclusion of such images is an attempt to change policy-report readers’ thinking about adult literacy because creative visual communication offers ways to approach this challenge that text alone cannot.

Computer technology is expanding our profession’s conception of composing, allowing visual information to play a substantial role in an increasing variety of composition assignments. This expansion, however, creates a major problem: How does one assess student work on these assignments? Current work in assessment provides only partial answers to this question. Consequently, this article will review current theory and practice in assessment, noting its limitations as well as its strengths. The article will then draw on work in both verbal and visual communication to explain an integrative approach to assessment, one that allows instructors to consider students’ work with visuals without losing sight of conventional goals of a “writing” course. The article concludes by illustrating this approach with an analysis of an unconventional student text “a T-shirt”that students submitted as the final assignment for a relatively conventional writing course.

The assessment framework presented here draws on theories of reflective practice and mediated activity to update or “multimodalize” the reflective texts students are sometimes asked to compose after completing an essay. The article underscores the importance of having students assume greater responsibility for cataloging and assessing the potentials of the texts they compose both within and beyond the space of the classroom.

David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students’ diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space.

Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

During the aftermath of recent disasters (both natural and human made), people have communicated by cobbling together available social software resources—relying on the capabilities of Internet tools such as blogs, news sites, and Flickr. Examining the use of social software taking place after the London bombings of July 7, 2005, I propose a method by which we can study users' literate appropriations to shape the development of more accommodating communication systems.

Rhetoric and composition’s increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks.

This teacher-researcher study explored the manner in which students created video compositions in a secondary English language arts media studies program. The study found that video composition is a complex, recursive process that allows for sequential multimodal representation of thoughts and ideas. Four areas are addressed: video allows for the expansion of compositional choices, demonstrates the verisimilitude of students’ initial concept to videotaped image, highlights the visuality in students’ re-presentations of ideas, and provides research methodological considerations.

This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers coming from oral literate traditions, the War Manpower Commission developed the Training Within Industry program, emphasizing visual and experiential literacies. This analysis can inform programs that use multimodal forms of instruction by acknowledging positive and negative implications of such literacy sponsorship.

This article describes the authors' work as formative evaluators of a mixed-reality science museum installation, Journey with Sea Creatures. Looking beyond the focal point of the screen to the spatial and temporal surroundings of the exhibit, the authors employed a technique they call retrospective narrative mapping in conjunction with sustained on-site observations, follow-up interviews with museum visitors, and the development of personas to better understand the user experience in multimodal informal learning environments. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

Students completing the text preview assignment use multimodal design, introducing classmates to texts in ways that motivate and inform their reading.

This article presents the concept of heritage literacy, a decision-making process by which people adopt, adapt, or alienate themselves from tools and literacies passed on between generations of people. In an auto-ethnographic study, four generations of a single family and Amish participants from the surrounding community were interviewed to explore the concept.

Abstract Scholars of rhetoric have veered away from non-traditional rhetorical artifacts in the classical period. In this article I examine the Ara Pacis Augustae, Altar of Augustan Peace, as one such overlooked rhetorical artifact. I argue the altar, although constructed as a war monument, shapes public memory to persuade the people of Rome to accept the dynastic succession of Augustus's heir. In addition, I show a variety of rhetorical theories operate on the altar in visual form including amplification, imitation, and enthymeme. Ultimately I contend that by focusing on non-traditional rhetorical artifacts, we can deepen our understanding of the rhetorical tradition in a period in which rhetoric is generally believed to have faded away. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathleen LampKathleen Lamp is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright St., 244 Lincoln Hall, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: lamp@uiuc.edu

This video reflection starts in a presentation on comics at the Thomas R. Watson Conference last October, which prompted the author to explore the etymology of cosmos and comos through an alternate reading of Gorgias'Encomium of Helen. The author then works with comos, as revelry, to offer thoughts on comics as a form of multimodal composition and its use in the classroom.

In a remix of the infamous Hitler meme—taking a scene from the movie,Downfall(2005), and adding subtitles appropriate (in this case) forKairosreaders—theamishaugur makes a pointed, humorous (to some) commentary on the status of multimodal composition scholars in English departments during job market season. (See the Logging On column for more discussion about this piece.)

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master’s course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint.

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.

One privilege enjoyed by new-media authors is the opportunity to realize representations of Self that are rich textual worlds in themselves and also to engage the wider world, with a voice, a smile, imagery, and sound. Still, closer investigation of multimedia composition practices reveals levels of complexity with which the verbal virtuoso is unconcerned. This article argues that while technology-afforded multimedia tools make it comparatively easy to author a vivid text, it is a multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize and publicize an authorial intention. Based on analysis of the digital story creation process of a youth named “Steven,” the authors attempt to demonstrate the operation of two forces upon which the successful multimodal realization of the author's intention may hinge: “fixity” and “fluidity.” The authors show how, within the process of digital self-representation, these forces can intersect to influence multimodal meaning making, and an author's life, in consequential ways.

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.

Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional identities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two midwifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional consumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwifery's recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework.

This analysis of the technology and pedagogy section of the TYCA national survey of writing programs covers online and onsite uses of technologies, multimodal essays and electronic portfolios, pedagogical training in the uses of technologies, intersections of training and curriculum innovation (i.e., electronic portfolios and multimodal compositions), and two-year college satisfaction levels with the integration of technology.

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings.

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials—textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, design and principles of composition move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward.

The visual rhetoric of data displays (e.g., charts, graphs, maps) has changed profoundly over the past 50 years as a result of research in display techniques, the application of traditional and emerging rhetorical approaches, and the democratizing effects of data design technology. Perhaps in no other visual realm than data design is the notion of clarity more critical or more contested. Indeed the ascendancy of rhetorical approaches was initiated by the perceptual/cognitive science of data design, which in seeking to identify optimal display techniques, fostered a concern for ethics and evoked the universality and minimalism of modernist aesthetics. The rhetoric of adaptation, which emphasizes the variability of audiences, purposes, and situational contexts, rendered clarity contingent and mutable-a moving target that requires constant attention. Social rhetoric considered data design as a collective construct, tethering clarity to visual discourse communities, convention-building, cultural values, and power. The concept of clarity has been further reoriented by the rhetoric of participation, which is fostered by interactive digital design that enables users to adapt displays according to their needs and interests.

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders' interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, children's literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

The visual rhetoric of data displays (e.g., charts, graphs, maps) has changed profoundly over the past 50 years as a result of research in display techniques, the application of traditional and emerging rhetorical approaches, and the democratizing effects of data design technology. Perhaps in no other visual realm than data design is the notion of clarity more critical or more contested. Indeed the ascendancy of rhetorical approaches was initiated by the perceptual/cognitive science of data design, which in seeking to identify optimal display techniques, fostered a concern for ethics and evoked the universality and minimalism of modernist aesthetics. The rhetoric of adaptation, which emphasizes the variability of audiences, purposes, and situational contexts, rendered clarity contingent and mutable-a moving target that requires constant attention. Social rhetoric considered data design as a collective construct, tethering clarity to visual discourse communities, convention-building, cultural values, and power. The concept of clarity has been further reoriented by the rhetoric of participation, which is fostered by interactive digital design that enables users to adapt displays according to their needs and interests.

This essay theorizes the ways in which comics, and Marvel Comics in particular, acted as sponsors of multimodal literacy for the author. In doing so, the essay demonstrates the possibilities that exist in examining comics more closely and in thinking about how literacy sponsorship happens in multimodal texts.

The Multimodal approach offers technical communicators and science writers an analytical tool to synthesize the meaning made in the connections across communicative modes. This multimodal synthesis can help technical communicators better exploit the meaning-making potential of multimodal combinations and understand the needs of future generations shaped by their increasingly developed multimodal literacy.

This pilot study obtained baseline information on verbal and visual rhetorics to teach microscopy techniques to college biology majors. We presented cell images to students in cell biology and biology writing classes and then asked them to identify textual, verbal, and visual cues that support microscopy learning. Survey responses suggest that these students recognized some of the rhetorical strategies used and conflated others, revealing intriguing questions for further research in undergraduate microscopy education.