Article analysis assignments are common in First Year Writing. This paper argues that animated GIFs are an effective bridge between informal and formal literacies and encourage students to engage in the more critical elements of the genre. This article helps instructors to incorporate low-tech and low stakes multimodal elements into their assignment cycles.

Designing writing assignments for pupils is a complex task. The teacher must make a lot of choices regarding what type of text to write, what the purpose of the writing should be, which audience the texts should have etc. Although formulating assignments is important for writing instruction, there has been limited insight into teachers’ choices regarding these aspects or the significance of the different school subjects when making such choices. We explore findings from a Norwegian intervention study on writing in primary school. The data includes 687 writing assignments designed by teachers for pupils in grades 3–7. Gee’s concept of semiotic domains forms the theoretical scope. Our research question is: What opportunities and challenges arise in teachers’ assignment design regarding different functional dimensions and semiotic domains? We show examples of how semiotic domains can collide, and that the combination of acts of writing, purpose, and audience can lead to assignments that are almost impossible to answer in a good way. We visualize the complexity of assignment design in a model which also is transferable to other contexts of assignment design.

With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Marva Cappello, Jennifer D. Turner, and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton, Darielle Blevins, Justin Coles, Autumn A. Griffin, Stephanie P. Jones, Alicia Rusoja, Amy Stornaiuolo, Claudine Taaffe, Tran Templeton, Vivek Vellanki, and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see ) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (), we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access, equity, and hope in education and educational research.

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Multimodal Research for Racial Justice, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/3/researchintheteachingofenglish32352-1.gif

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through both reflection and enactment and what rhetorical scholarship can gain from attending to these practices. Ultimately, we argue that putting rhetoric, nursing, and CSD in conversation deepens each field’s understanding of how empathy can be taught and learned.

The architecture of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), set up under Her Highness Sheikha Moza Al-Misnedd and the Qatar Foundation, spatially embodies new possibilities because AIA Gold Medal award-winning architect Ricardo Legorreta designed buildings that both challenge and encompass Gulf Arabian tradition. The buildings exemplify, enact, and embody new ways of experiencing gendered educational identity that also honors traditional local values. This architecture is important because TAMUQ is a U.S. institution that serves several different international student populations. This article emphasizes how TAMUQ functions as a heterotopia, one which creates embodied experiences of gender, education, and identity and requires what Rogoff termed “a curious eye” to discern how these educational spaces reflect changing identities in the Gulf states.

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowdfunding campaigns on the platform Kickstarter to develop an understanding of characteristics of successful campaigns. The authors scraped 327,586 campaign pages, analyzing the multimodal elements of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. They found that successful campaigns featured more images, links, and gifs and more frequently included a project video than did unsuccessful campaigns. Images, links, and the presence of a project video had a positive impact on success while gifs and project galleries did not. These findings give business communicators practical guidance, develop theoretical aspects of Kickstarter research, and validate previous findings with a larger data set.

ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

This webtext develops a dual theory of dark patterns based in the ancient concept of mêtis, or rhetorical cunning, and the Gestalt principles of visual design related to optical illusion and perspective. This theory is used to interpret dark patterns of six representative types to show how it can support a reading of other deceptive texts and web interfaces more broadly.

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), we need to reimagine our workplace identities as separate from the spaces in which labor takes place.

If writing pedagogy aims at writer development rather than text fixing, understanding how the writer sees that development is a key element of our skillset as writing teachers. In this article, we argue that a writing manifesto is a way for academic writers to express their development – one that, crucially, draws on semiotic resources outside the usual palette of academic writing. We situate this argument in the literature about reflective writing, which sees reflection as key in writing development, but which also points to the limits of certain kinds of reflective writing. Specifically, several scholars have noted how the reflective essay, traditionally conceived, tends to be constructed of formulaic mappable moves that can obstruct meaningful reflection. By analysing a corpus of manifestos created by doctoral writers, we show how the writers’ use of distinctive semiotic resources – irony, parody, font choice, layout – allow the writers to position themselves as agentive, and present themselves as the makers, not the recipients, of rules about writing. The manifesto, then, is a useful genre for enabling reflection and development because it can create space for writers’ agency and text ownership. Our analysis highlights the value of further discussion about alternate modes of reflective writing.

In his Caricature and National Character, Christopher J. Gilbert contends that caricature can help us understand, address, or, at least, observe the tension between a national character defined by the promise of democratic peace and by the stubborn persistence of war. Through the comic looking glass, caricature reveals American national character both for what it is and for what it could be. Reveling in the ugly realities of xenophobic, uber-masculine warrism, racism, and the sometimes demagogic impulses on which American national character rests, caricature refuses the mythologies of American exceptionalism, righteousness, and democratic idealism. Caricature asks audiences to see the imperfections of the American experiment not as abhorrent accidents of democracy gone occasionally wrong but as essential features of our national character. Caricature reminds us that war is who we are.Gilbert's book is divided into four case studies, each taking an individual caricature artist's work in turn. In the first analysis, Gilbert considers perhaps the most iconic representation of American identity, Uncle Sam. In the second, he turns to the work of Theodore Geisel and his strange animals compelling Americans to support involvement in WWII. In the third, Gilbert analyzes Ollie Harrington's use of images of Black children to reframe and refocus conversations about Vietnam through the lens of racism at home. And, in the final case, he turns a critical eye to Ann Telnaes's comic critiques of the War on Terror and the self-professed war presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.In his first analysis, Gilbert engages with historical representations of American identity vis-à-vis the oft caricatured figure of Uncle Sam. In particular, he focuses on James Montgomery Flagg's famous “I Want You” poster as a cultural touchstone connecting American national character to war. As “a rhetorical vessel for the body politic” and the “face of [American] militarism,” Uncle Sam projects a version of American identity that is paternal, white, and decidedly pro-war (46, 38). What is more, the image of Uncle Sam demanding (commanding) democratic citizens to join the US war effort flies in the face of a national character built around individual liberties and democratic ideals.From the nation's cartoon uncle to its cartooning doctor, Gilbert's second case study takes up the remarkably xenophobic, misogynistic, and patently racist WWII-era caricature of Theodore Geisel. As with Flagg's Uncle Sam, Geisel's caricatures featuring awkwardly proportioned animals, insects, and machinery ask readers to embrace the necessity, perhaps even the allure, of war. Although better remembered as the author and illustrator of beloved children's books and graduation presents (Dr. Seuss), Geisel's caricatures, goading the nation into joining the war effort while shaming isolationists and politicians, present readers with a national character caught between the absurd reality of war and the banality of its centrality to the American experience.In the third chapter, Gilbert considers the cartoons of Oliver “Ollie” Harrington. Harrington's caricatures, in addition to his popular character Bootsie, prominently feature Black children, recasting American war culture as a racist war on American culture and Black Americans in particular. Emphasizing the innocence and naïve wisdom of children, Harrington's drawings reveal the limits of the democratic promise for Black GIs returning from war abroad to find their children at war at home. Further, relying on children as focal points, and Black children in particular, Harrington's art dances along the insider/outsider divide offering a powerful self-critique that emphasizes the all too real consequences of American warrism for Black children who are otherwise excluded from the iconography of national character and from the demos in general. As Gilbert explains, such caricatures expose the whiteness of American war culture and national character while reminding audiences that “all war is cultural war” (135).In the final case study, Gilbert focuses his attention on Ann Telnaes's caricatures of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the self-professed “war presidents” of the War on Terror. Drawing “the people” through the person of the president, Telnaes's images emphasize the egoism and self-interest of the “American Idiot” that contrasts the collectivist impulses of democracy. Her renderings of Bush and Trump as would-be despots bedecked in jewels, capes, and crowns surrounded by adoring courtier toadies represent the president as an appropriately naked emperor king or, in the case of Trump, the Queen of Hearts. Relying on farce, Gilbert argues that these metonymic critiques of national character through the lens of the national leader highlight the false greatness, the inflated ego, and the self-proclaimed exceptionalism on which American national character rests and which cannot hold up to the scrutiny of war.Readers—especially those interested in editorial cartoons and comedy—will find Gilbert's critiques of Flagg, Geisel, Harrington, and Telnaes productive extensions of any number of conversations about visual rhetoric and visual metaphor. His critiques model the utility of tracing a particular artist's sense of humor and approach to a subject over the course of its historical arc. Together, they make a strong case for the utility of caricature as a funhouse mirror amplifying the particular absurdities of American democracy and identity that otherwise can be obscured by the lens of political discourse and public address. For comedy scholars, Gilbert's critique offers ample evidence for arguments regarding laughter's capacity to disrupt the established expectations of dominant discourses rendering them rigid, mechanical, or fixed in place. Such comic disruptions create opportunities for critique by asking audiences to consider both how things appear to be on the surface and what they conceal from view simultaneously.1 Critics of war rhetoric, too, will find Gilbert's book useful. His argument that caricature reveals the United States for the war culture that it (always) is, and that war functions conceptually as a caricature of democratic peace, are likely worthy of connecting to even non-comedic texts.In terms of shortcomings, Caricature and National Character almost certainly leaves someone's favorite caricaturist on the cutting room floor. Readers might expect to find more about Herb Block, Thomas Nast, and Gary Trudeau, for instance, than they will in these pages.2 This is an all-too-common problem for any book that takes an historical approach to popular culture; for the most part, Gilbert gestures towards these and other artists in contextualizing his criticisms. Perhaps more importantly for this reader, the omission of the Obama era of the War on Terror feels like a missed opportunity. Framed by Telnaes's caricatures, which featured Bush and Trump much more prominently than Obama, Gilbert's case study works as a critique of the presidency and, by extension, the people it represents. As a treatment of the War on Terror, however, addressing Obama's role as merely an extension of the Bush doctrine leaves open questions about the rise of drone warfare, partisanship and the presidency, and, perhaps more importantly, war's capacity as caricature to cut through the contradictions of a presidential discourse that professed a desire for the end of war and policy that perpetuated it. Obama's War on Terror, in this way, might be read as a caricature of his war rhetoric and, in so doing, offer evidence of caricature's critical utility for scholars of rhetoric and war beyond the context of comedy.In total, Gilbert's book offers a particularly powerful argument for the utility of caricature as a way of peeling back the mythological layers of national character to reveal more clearly the lived realities of a nation and its character. Caricature, like comedy generally, exists alongside dominant narratives and mythologies as a ready critique of the excesses of nationalism and exceptionalism. In particular, caricatures of war remind audiences that war both is and is not a caricature of culture. War is at once the worst possible expression of democratic cooperation but also, at least in the case of the United States, part and parcel of the national character—an exceptional and yet unremarkable feature of what it is to be American. Reveling in the ugliness of war so often veiled by discourses that encourage audiences to overlook or all together ignore the gruesome realities of war and national character, caricature challenges audiences to look at war, to look at culture, to look at the nation—especially when the looking is hard to do.

This article asserts that auditory cues can be categorized by rhetorical function into the categories of visual rhetoric, defined by Amare and Manning under Peirce’s Ten Classes of Sign, understanding visual rhetoric to include both images and text. This article expands this definition to aural-visual rhetoric, including auditory elements as visual rhetoric to analyze multimodal Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), demonstrating this method using the opening tutorial scene from Portal 2.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.

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.

The present article examines collaborative writing in organizational consulting and training, where writing takes place as part of a group discussion assignment and is carried out by using digital writing technologies. In the training, the groups use digital tablets as their writing device in order to document their answers in the shared digital platform. Using multimodal conversation analysis as a method, the article illustrates the way writing is interactionally accomplished in this setting where digital writing intertwines with face-to-face interaction as the groups jointly formulate a documentable written entry for specific institutional purposes. The results show how writing is managed in situated ways and organized by three specific aspects: access, publicity, and broader organizational practice. The article advances prior understanding of the embodied nature of writing and writing with technologies by demonstrating how the body and the material and social nature of writing technologies intertwine within situated social interaction.

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader’s comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels.

On the wall of a large lecture hall at Indiana University, Bloomington hangs a painting that includes in its background a depiction of a Ku Klux Klan rally, complete with a burning cross and hooded Klansmen. The painting, titled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press,” is one of twenty-two mural panels depicting Indiana history that were created by Thomas Hart Benton for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and later installed in three locations across the university campus. In the most recent debate about the panel, defenders argued that removal would amount to censorship and, furthermore, would mean the destruction of the painting due to its material fragility. Critics argued that it should be removed because hateful imagery has no place in learning spaces, and classrooms must be welcoming to all students. Ultimately, IU administration decided to leave the panel on display but to convert the lecture hall “to other uses beginning in the spring semester of 2018.” They argued that “repurposing the room is the best accommodation of the multiple factors that the murals raise: our obligation to be a welcoming community to all of our students and facilitate their learning; our stewardship of this priceless art; and our obligation to stand firm in defense of artistic expression.”1 As the outcome of the administration's compromise, “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press” hangs in a largely unoccupied room as a depiction of a hate-filled chapter of Indiana's past, hidden, as it were, in plain sight.IU's Benton mural is one local instantiation of national debates around what to do with representations of and homages to racism in the United States: one side argues for the value of historical and cultural significance; the other argues against honoring representations of racism and hate. While physical sites are often central to the public conversation around what to do with the symbolism of the United States’ racist history, Stephen M. Monroe smartly demonstrates in his excellent new book Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (2021) how unexamined semiotic traditions can covertly sustain racist hegemony within the discursive practices of our institutions.Examining the discursive practices of his own local community at the University of Mississippi, Monroe asks how we can persuade more white people in the silent majority to become educated and engage in conversations about racial equality and justice (220, 221). In answer, he recognizes that we probably need both radical activism and reconciliation. However, he also insists that scholars of language and rhetoric have a responsibility to respond and act from within their local communities. His intention is “to push readers firmly away from passive acceptance of semiotic traditions and toward purposeful consideration and confrontation of those semiotic traditions” (13). Indeed, this book makes an important contribution to a vision of rhetorical scholarship that aims at producing legitimate cultural change. Monroe's intervention is multidisciplinary, targeting the fields of both rhetoric and Southern studies, and his contribution is triple-layered. He brings the disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric to bear on the interdisciplinary field of Southern studies; he brings a thorough example of archival work in institutional history to the field of rhetoric; and he models the kind of locally-situated rhetorical intervention he imagines in his call for readers to interrogate our communities’ stakes in the perpetuation of racism across the nation.The central theoretical thread of Monroe's argument—a thread that applies beyond the confines of racism—is that history, language and symbols, and communal identity are interdependent. Combining methods of critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, and archival research, he argues that Old South rhetoric, or “confederate rhetoric,” continues to circulate and sustain racist communal identities across the US South, specifically at the region's universities. Because the semiotic traditions of confederate rhetoric “often create stasis or even reversion,” he explains, institutions’ abilities to achieve racial progress is slowed (13). In other words, confederate rhetoric and racism sustain themselves and each other by hiding in plain sight: in university nicknames and yearbooks, in the guise of school spirit, in Southern collegiate traditions, and, in IU's case, depictions of the Ku Klux Klan.A significant strength of Monroe's project, in fact, is his archive. Over the course of the book's seven chapters, he examines university nicknames, yearbooks, cheers, and historical figures, demonstrating how such semiotic traditions constitute an archive of racist hegemony. He begins, for example, by tracing the history of The University of Mississippi's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to its appropriation from a term used by enslaved Black people to refer to the wife of a plantation owner. He follows the evolution of the name through yearbooks from 1897 to the present day to illustrate how the term covertly sustains racist attitudes. Reading the circulation and solidification of “Ole Miss” through the lens of Laurie Gries's work on virility, Monroe argues that “the term grew in vitality and consequentiality throughout most of the twentieth century, but it did not transform in any substantial sense. Instead, after being appropriated and going viral in the late nineteenth century, ‘Ole Miss’ became and still remains a force for ideological stabilization and stasis” (37).2 Because the term has not been interrogated by the larger university community, as analysis of the archive demonstrates, year after year its racist connotations remain palpable but easily disregarded by that community.Keeping his archival focus on his own institution, Monroe next examines the tradition of the “Hotty Toddy” cheer at the University of Mississippi, explaining how “indexicality is a semiotic phenomenon always at work” (66). “Indexing makes certain meanings always available,” he writes, “or when viewed from another angle, always unavoidable” (66). Thus, for example, the confederate rhetoric within the “Hotty Toddy” cheer is stabilized with each discursive use, indexing a racist agenda. As Monroe puts it, “When white people at the University of Mississippi hurl a beloved cheer against Black classmates, the cheer itself fuels and performs punitive cultural work and redefines itself in ways that are not easily revised or redacted” (66). This quality of the linguistic markers points to an evolving thread in the book's argument: discourse serves the purposes of emergent identity constitution. Each time members of the community cheer “Hotty Toddy,” they “are not simply reflecting identities previously assumed but are reiterating publicly and socially a collective identity that emerges and strengthens again and again with every interactive performance” (68). Because of indexicality, to utter the nickname “Ole Miss” or to cheer “Hotty Toddy” can serve at once to demonstrate membership in the (white) UM community and to exclude others.Even as performances like the “Hotty Toddy” cheer constitute and strengthen communal identity, Monroe expertly emphasizes a more sinister function: historically indexed acts of racism enable those in positions of power and privilege to deny its systemic nature by arguing that such events are isolated. To illustrate, he analyzes a six-year period (2010–2016) in which a series of racist events and protests took place at the University of Missouri. In recounting these incidences, Monroe highlights how university administrators minimized the string of events as isolated and unreflective of the larger university community's values. Likewise, he returns to the controversy over UM's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to show how confederate rhetoric is “naturalized within discourse communities, turned into common sense, and thereby protected from controversy” (112).Monroe analyzes two additional traditions at the University of Mississippi—Blind Jim Ivey and the flying of the Confederate battle flag—to illustrate that the indexicality of racist events cannot be minimized without symbolic and material consequences. He argues that “[w]ithin a community that reveres tradition, one way to shelter a problematic word or symbol is to place it beneath the protective notion of tradition” (143). When Blind Jim Ivey and flying the Confederate battle flag are synchronized into a false sense of historical continuity with other traditions, rather than the truths of their histories confronted and eliminated, they continue to serve as racist ideological symbols. Confederate rhetoric itself, in fact, becomes a tool for synchronization that elides the power that white people continue to wield in the South and the United States at large. “Rather than providing voice and agency to minorities,” Monroe writes, “‘synchronization elides all kinds of possible voices’; it creates undemocratic absences. It silences” (165).While confederate rhetoric certainly silences, Monroe skillfully uses his archive to reveal the complexity of how such rhetoric sustains itself. By returning to yearbooks as archival records of a university's culture and pointing out how racist images in yearbooks are reflective of a culture that openly encourages racist displays, Monroe is able to argue that institutions scapegoat individuals while, in reality, racist acts have long been sanctioned by the larger community. Thus, individuals who face repercussions today for past racist acts “were not sources of discordant messages of hate and exclusion, but were, instead, conveyors of conformist messages” (169). Even so, he characterizes personal interactions as potential sites of redemption and transformation: “Moments of white realization and conversion,” which occur most effectively at the interpersonal level, “must be multiplied within southern communities if the region's long traditions of confederate rhetoric are to be substantially weakened or eliminated” (183, 184). We must recognize that racism is institutionally sustained while acting on the progressive potential of interpersonal engagement.In the final chapter, Monroe turns the book's focus back on himself. Recognizing his “layered levels of privilege and power” as a “white male, cishet, tenure-track scholar who has held multiple administrative positions at a research university,” he asks: “what will I do with that privilege and power?” (189). Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities is an attempt to begin that difficult and indispensable work. He calls upon other scholars of language to perform similar tasks, arguing that white people have the power to change confederate rhetoric and language scholars should advocate for that (201). Through his archival analysis of Southern collegiate history and traditions, Stephen Monroe offers a valuable model of situated scholarship for rhetoricians hoping to effect cultural change at their own institutions.

This article argues that through embodied presentations and the multimodal, international and intercultural affordances of YouTube, the rhetoric of Black hair care YouTubers is tactical TPC toward social justices. We note the interactive comments section as a place for technical communicators to identify and redress issues in normative instructional discourse. This scholarship extends TPC beyond “how to do it” and “how I do it” toward “how we must view it in order to do it.’

ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

Recent decades have seen a shift regarding ideas of and approaches to literacy. One example is that the individual-psychological perspective focusing primarily on specific writing skills that used to be predominant has been extended and complemented by functional, social semiotic, and sociocultural perspectives where the interaction between the individual's use of language resources and the social, cultural, and historical contexts is in focus (e.g., Furthermore, issues of writing instruction and research have, in recent years, received far more attention than before, which can be noted by the publication of handbooks of writing research (MacArthur et al., 2016), writing development (Beard et al., 2009), writing instruction (Graham et al., 2019), and reviews of writing research

Scandinavian writing research forms a relatively new field, with an increased number of studies conducted in the last two decades. In this qualitative synthesis review of 87 peer reviewed journal articles from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden published between 2010 and 2020, the aim was to outline the landscape of current educational writing research from the region. The sample included research articles published in both Scandinavian and international journals. Our analysis focused on the articles’ research approaches and main themes regarding the object of investigation. The main themes identified were Writing Instruction, Writing Assessment, and Students’ Text. We found a predominance of studies conducted in the context of language arts/first language (L1) education, concerning either disciplinary or general aspects of writing. We also found a predominance of approaches based on either sociocultural or social semiotic theory. Furthermore, a majority of the reviewed studies were explorative and small-scale, and, for the Writing Assessment studies in particular, directed at the secondary stages of school. The results suggest a call for future studies focusing on writing interventions and studies deploying a wide range of methodological approaches, as well as studies based on inter-Scandinavian collaborations across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learning. This classroom research investigated multimodal composition using the virtual paint program Google Tilt Brush™ with 47 elementary school students (ages 10–11 years) using a head-mounted display and motion sensors. Multimodal analysis of video, screen capture, and think-aloud data attended to sensory-motor affordances and constraints for embodiment. Modal constraints were the immateriality of the virtual text, virtual disembodiment, and somatosensory mismatch between the virtual and physical worlds. Potentials for new forms of embodied multimodal representation in VR involved extensive bodily, haptic, and locomotive movement. The findings are significant given that research of embodied cognition points to sensorimotor action as the basis for language and communication.

Understanding the expectations of employers contributes to the relevancy of business and professional communication (BPC) courses. Studies that bridge the gap between course content and workplace expectations support this process. This article presents findings from a scale development procedure to analyze BPC skills using a multimodal perspective. Employers ( N = 260) were asked what skills they perceive to be communication and how proficient they expect a recent college graduate to be to better understand the expectations that graduates face when entering the job market. The findings have implications for course design, curriculum selection, and program organization.

Cara Finnegan's Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital is an important new work poised to bring a rhetorical perspective into public conversations about politics and visual culture. With a deep and thoughtful reading of the historical development of visual technologies, Finnegan examines the cultural importance of photographic images of American presidents. Rather than analyzing individual depictions of presidents, Finnegan interrogates the complex interplay between photography as both technology and practice and the meanings of the American presidency. As she puts it, instead of focusing on how particular images of individual presidents are meaningful, she asks “how presidents became photographic. In what ways . . . did photography shape public experience?”1As in her previous book, the excellent Making Photography Matter, Finnegan marshals an impressive mix of archival materials, close readings of individual images, and a mastery of cultural and technological histories to study the shifting terrain of visual depiction.2 Where Photographic Presidents differs from its predecessor is in the focus on the connection between photography and American political culture and in the accessibility of its writing. Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of Photographic Presidents is the effortless elegance of its prose and the liveliness of its narrative arc. The methodological questions about visual rhetoric that Finnegan asked in her earlier book are in the background, and on display are the insights of a thoughtful and thorough analysis.Given its emphasis on accessible analysis, the introductory chapter is short and to the point, focused mainly on establishing the key turn away from “presidential photography” and towards the “photographic president.” Once this emphasis on the fluid nature of visual representations is in place, Finnegan moves to the narrative itself. The subsequent chapters trace the shifting practices of photographing presidents across four key periods, each punctuated by changes in photographic technology.The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 led to an American fascination with the photographic image and what Finnegan terms the “Daguerreotype President.” Oddly, one of the first images widely circulated through the new technology was of George Washington, who had died some forty years earlier. While obviously not available to sit for a photograph, daguerreotypes were made of various paintings and sculptures of Washington. These photographs proved remarkably popular. The use of the new visual technology to circulate the image of America's first president in the 1840s helped, as Finnegan notes, to reinforce the nation's history and, importantly, this historical representation also worked to inscribe photography into the national character. As Finnegan writes, “In 1848 the nation still needed Washington, but so, apparently, did photography: to authorize its value, to connect it to the nation's past and present, and to establish its own norms of portraiture for decades to come.”3 These norms of portraiture continue as a theme throughout the remainder of this section. Finnegan examines the diaries of John Quincy Adams, for instance, as he reflected on his experiences sitting for daguerreotype photographs and his belief that photographs might help instill democratic values by allowing citizens to see themselves as others see them.The democratizing potential of the photographic images becomes central in the book's second section, which examines the development of cheaper and smaller cameras and paper photographs, which allowed for the rise of the “Snapshot President.” Presidents during this period took full advantage of their photographic image but also had to contend with a growing number of amateur photographers, or “camera fiends.” Added to the increasing accessibility of the camera was the ability of newspapers to print photographs more easily with the development of halftone reproductions. Together, these technological innovations, as Finnegan observes, fueled the American public's desire for photography. As she notes, “the new impulse for pictures demanded quantity,”4 and one of the most desirable subjects for this new photographic impulse was the American president. Finnegan explores this interest in immediate and plentiful photographic images of the president through a careful consideration of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. The ubiquity of amateur photographers and the ability of newspapers to publish their photographs helped instill the value of timeliness into American visual culture. Finnegan notes that many contemporary newspapers insisted upon labeling one of their photographic images as the “last photograph” of the President, suggesting the crucial element of images being instantaneously available to an eager public.5As cameras became smaller and both professional and amateur photographers more ubiquitous, pressures grew on the White House to find ways to manage what Finnegan labels the era of the “Candid Camera President.” The candid camera period between the Roosevelts saw presidents facing regular intrusion by amateur photographers as well as increasingly sophisticated professional news photographers. President-elect Woodrow Wilson, for example, angrily confronted a photographer who snapped a picture of his daughter, Jessie Wilson. Finnegan recounts the impact of German photographer Erich Salomon, who was labeled “king of the indiscreet” for his skill in hiding his camera and snapping images of world leaders in unposed settings.6 The ability of photographers to slip into politics and give the public a glimpse of real negotiation led to both a growing public demand for unscripted images and the formalization of press relations through the development of what would eventually become an official White House press secretary. This effort to manage the photographs taken of presidents, however, was in tension with, as Finnegan argues, “the new visual values of candid photography, those of access, intimacy, and energy.”7 Finnegan uses the tension between presidential impression management and public hunger for intimate images to frame the complex visual politics surrounding Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As is now widely known, FDR's affliction with polio limited his mobility, and his efforts to manage how he was represented have been widely studied. Finnegan adds a fascinating perspective by focusing not so much on prohibitions on images of his infirm body but on the ways FDR made himself visible and, in so doing, broadened norms surrounding the use of candid shots. Here Finnegan contends that FDR's “media savvy” extended well beyond his use of radio and includes his careful orchestration of photographs of him. “FDR would not hide from the spotlight,” Finnegan writes. “He would be seen, but on his terms and according to an ever changing yet firm set of rules.”8These firm rules, of course, would not last, and with the advent of new media technology, especially television and the internet, the presidents’ ability to govern how they were photographed diminished. Finnegan's fourth era focuses on the development of the “Social Media President” and the widespread ability of everyday citizens to create, circulate, and alter images. The effort to maintain some control over photographic images led to the formalization of official White House photographers, and Finnegan recounts the ways presidents like Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson used official photographers as extensions of their own efforts at image management. The official White House photographer plays a crucial role in Finnegan's final chapter, a thorough consideration of Barack Obama's use of social media. Obama's chief White House photographer, Pete Souza, framed himself as a “visual historian” and used the image sharing social media site, Flickr, to release thousands of images directly to the public. As Finnegan notes, this media strategy allowed the Obama White House to offer the kind of intimate, behind-the-scenes access the public craved, albeit carefully orchestrated by the administration, as well as an opportunity to bypass the traditional media.9 Continuous publicizing of presidential photographs directly to the public bolstered the perception that Obama was media savvy and technologically sophisticated. Iconic images ranging from tense images of the situation room during the mission against Osama Bin Laden to playful moments of the President interacting with children were made immediately available without relying on traditional media outlets. Such direct access also allowed the administration to respond to growing interest in meme and remix culture. In this way, as Finnegan notes, the Flickr archive of the Obama presidency continues “to serve as a resource for invention and critique,”10 including Souza's use of those images to provide subtle but damning criticisms of the administration of Donald Trump.Photographic Presidents concludes by resituating its key question, how presidents come to be photographic, and by considering the complex interplay of new visual technologies, shifting cultural norms of representation, and the changing nature of the American presidency. Photography, like the presidency, is “not and never has been only one thing”11 and Finnegan challenges us to continue examining the intersection of visual and political culture as various forces cause it to shift and transform.Finnegan's latest book is a masterwork in rhetorical scholarship and demonstrates how a close reading of visual texts and the contexts within which they become meaningful provide engaging and provocative insights. The archival work, careful historical analysis, and thoughtful critical examination are exemplary. This book should be widely studied not only in courses on visual rhetoric and media technology but in any course on rhetorical criticism or archival methods. It is also one of a relatively rare set of books within rhetorical studies that I would recommend to a family member or friend who wanted to understand what rhetorical studies does. This is not only impressive scholarship but also an engaging, funny, and at times delightful work of nonfiction that could as easily be enjoyed by a person interested in presidents as it could be someone with a fascination for American popular culture or media.

In this essay, I argue for more representations of Caribbean women in rhetorical studies. In the effort toward representation, specifically for Haitian women, I developed a framework named Caribbean women’s rhetorics (CWR). CWR creates an interdisciplinary, multicultural, Black feminist framework and space where Caribbean women’s lived experiences are the primary focus of making, producing, sharing, and recognizing underrepresented rhetorical knowledges that offer rich representations. To do this work, the features of CWR uphold that value via voicing, proverbs, storytelling, reflection, linguistic practices, and multimodal composing. In providing an approach for the application of CWR, I analyze my interactive digital book The Cultivation of Haitian Women’s Sense of Selves: Toward a Field of Action. With CWR, I hope to expand the existing body of work on Caribbean women’s knowledges to disrupt sociocultural inequalities and improve the quality of life for Caribbean women.

This essay analyzes Alonzo Earl Foringer Foringer, Alonzo Earl. “The Greatest Mother in the World” [1917?]. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Web. [Google Scholar]’s “Greatest Mother in the World” poster, created for the American Red Cross during World War I but circulated in Britain and America during World War I and II. Although the image was highly circulated and reproduced, it has received limited scholarly attention. The analysis examines the poster and a magazine image with accompanying text from a visual rhetoric perspective. The essay argues that the poster and magazine image deploy rhetorics of motherhood and saliency to foster “flattening effects” that not only erase other maternal figures but also elevate ideologies of white supremacy.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, disability studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

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.

This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students’ digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students’ use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a particular interest in their use of sound elements. Based on social semiotic theory of multimodality, the analysis shows how the students in a variety of ways used sound elements, together with other semiotic resources, to explore their interpretation of the poetic text. Sound elements in particular became a key resource in the interpretive work, giving the students the opportunity to elaborate on topical issues of interest and importance to them while reinforcing their social agency. The study demonstrates the relevance of sound elements in students’ digital composing and explorations of poetry. Furthermore, it reveals how the students showed a capacity as well as a willingness to act, to have influence, and to make substantiated claims for recognition regarding critical issues related to sexuality and society.

This past decade, the healthcare industry has undergone a transformation with where, how, and why writing happens. For example, what the health and medical professions conceive of as “documentation” or “charting” is writing, even though practitioners call it by another name. Additionally, most writing in healthcare settings is now also multimodal, incorporating textual, digital, visual, and aural content. This essay focuses on the patient decision aid as pedagogical tool that embraces the technological and multimodal changes in health and medicine. Patient decision aids can be understood as a multimodal tool guiding shared decision-making practices. As a genre, the decision aid prompts students to engage in a series of writing modalities – visuals, narrative, texts – as well as the application of user experience and design. Finally, the decision aid as an assignment offers explicit connections between humanities-based students and broader healthcare industries.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> The linguistic framing strategies used in media reporting on illegal drugs have been extensively documented, but less attention has been directed toward visuals, particularly data visualizations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Positioning illegal drug use as a criminal justice problem or a public health issue are types of frameworks that use specific rhetorical strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What are the rhetorical strategies used in data visualizations published during the crack and opioid drug epidemics, respectively? 2. Do these strategies advance dominant media narratives that crack addiction should be criminalized but opioid addiction should be treated like a public health issue? And if so, how is this accomplished? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> Drawing from the media studies approach previously employed in a study in technical and professional communication (TPC) on information design trends, I apply the concept of “scripto-visual” rhetoric to select data visualizations published by mainstream news media during both drug epidemics. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> I argue these graphics escalated the perceived threat during both drug epidemics but different scripto-visual rhetorical strategies were used. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Attending to ethical considerations in the creation of data visualizations has long been important in TPC, while scholarship has integrated social justice as a core component of the discipline. In the last section of this article, I bring these themes together by arguing that a social justice ethic is needed in data design work. I then propose a critical heuristic constructed from Jones et al.’s positionality, privilege, and power framework that can be used analytically or as an inventional tool to tease out the ways particular scripto-visual rhetorical decisions may be promoting inequities.

Communicating clearly about their socially responsible activities is becoming increasingly important for companies, as a growing number of stakeholders with different goals, knowledge, and language skills seek information on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Furthermore, the ability to communicate clearly is particularly appreciated in the workplace. To fill a gap in CSR communication training, this article describes the development and preliminary evaluation of an interdisciplinary and multimodal online module whose goal is to train Dutch-speaking business students in the production of accessible CSR content in English. After presenting our module, we discuss its implications for future training and for corporate communication.

Technical communication instructors, especially those with expertise in visual rhetoric, information design, or multimedia writing are well-suited to teach an introductory Digital Humanities (DH) course. Offering a DH course provides an opportunity to reach extrafield audiences and work with students from a variety of humanities disciplines who may not have the option of taking such a course in their home department. The article advocates for a DH course that offers a methods-driven pedagogy that engages students with active learning by requiring them to research, dissect, and report on existing DH projects, as well as work with existing datasets and methods from prior student research projects or existing DH tools. The sample student project reviewed here uses the data visualization software ImagePlot, and discussion includes how the student used the tool to examine changes in brightness, hue, and color saturation, as well as calculate the total number of distinct shapes from 397 comic book covers. Ultimately, the students are tasked with developing a research question and moving to an articulated methods-driven approach for exploring the question. The student project along with the tools and sample datasets available with them are treated as a module that may be included in an introductory DH course syllabus or training session.

As the bicentennial of the momentous 1824 election approaches, Andrew Jackson is as relevant as ever. Jackson's shadow looms large over contemporary discussions regarding populism, democracy, and America's history of racism and colonization. Moreover, interest in Jackson has grown thanks to President Trump's efforts to frame Jackson as a precursor to his own brand of nationalist populism. A variety of analysts, from historian Mark Cheathem in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson to Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade in Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans, have recently revisited the Jacksonian period both to enrich our understanding of that unique historical moment and to offer insights about present day affairs. Amos Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership is a welcome addition to the conversation that provides valuable perspective about Jackson's presidency and the rhetorical nature of presidential authority in general.Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal aims to “give voice to the seventh president” by creating “an account of major addresses’ development, the reasoning and constraints behind them, and ultimately, their impact on the polity” (1–2). The book represents the most comprehensive rhetorical examination of Jackson's public remarks to date. Kiewe not only provides a window into the inner machinations of Jackson's administration and the painstaking process of crafting a public address; he challenges existing understandings of the presidency as an institution. Although Jeffrey Tulis, in The Rhetorical Presidency, argued that the presidency became a seat of popular (rather than constitutional) leadership in the twentieth century, Kiewe persuasively demonstrates that Jackson may have in fact been “the first rhetorical president,” arguing that Jackson's public addresses changed the trajectory of his administration and fundamentally altered the presidency itself (243).Kiewe accomplishes this through in-depth rhetorical histories of Jackson's public addresses. In chapter 1, Kiewe argues that Jackson's 1824 campaign was innovative; Jackson debuted a novel campaign strategy of “writing letters to private individuals for public distribution” (16) and inaugurated a “new era” of party politics featuring populist appeals (36). In chapters 2 through 9, Kiewe conducts case studies of Jackson's inaugural addresses, his first annual message to Congress, his rhetoric regarding the Nullification Crisis and Indian removal policies, and his rhetoric supporting his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Kiewe also devotes attention to addresses of seemingly “minor importance,” such as the Maysville road bill veto, which involved a proposal to improve a sixty-mile stretch of road in Kentucky and foreshadowed the pro-Union rhetoric that would define Jackson's response to the Nullification Crisis (77).Chapter 10 takes a step back from Jackson's rhetoric to analyze public images of Jackson. Kiewe, using a visual rhetoric approach, argues that Jackson's popular leadership was reinforced by his supporters’ construction of Jackson as a military hero and populist icon through political cartoons and other portraits. This chapter is a detour from the book's main line of argument, but a welcome one that provides enlightening context about how audiences of the time understood Jackson's leadership. In chapter 11, Kiewe analyzes Jackson's farewell address and credits him with further developing the farewell address as a unique genre of presidential rhetoric.Through these case studies, Kiewe develops several insights about Jackson and his rhetoric. First, Kiewe challenges portrayals of Jackson as “brute, rough, savage, and backward” by documenting his rhetorical skill, strategic acumen, and principled devotion to the Union (4). Second, Kiewe sheds light on the “cumulative effort” that underpinned Jackson's rhetorical presidency (68). Jackson's most famous addresses often underwent several stages of drafting. Jackson would create a first draft that would undergo subsequent vetting and revision from his inner circle, such as Andrew Jackson Donelson, Amos Kendall, Martin Van Buren, John Eaton, James Hamilton, Roger Taney, and others. Kiewe describes Jackson's initial drafts as containing partisan and “forceful language” (75), whereas the revised final forms are “moderate relative to his initial points” (90, 248). These detailed accounts of the administration's speechwriting colorfully illustrate Jackson's behind-the-scenes struggle to balance popular leadership with adherence to the norms of his office. Third, Jackson is revealed to be a rhetorical president cognizant of the extra-constitutional powers of his office, who frequently “appealed directly” to the public and “used his rhetoric as a political tool . . . for governing purposes” (243).Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal provides a granular look at a crucial chapter of American history, using a rhetorical perspective that highlights how presidential authority is in part constructed through discourse. Given the book's nineteenth-century subject matter, Kiewe's meticulous account of Jackson's governance and speechwriting process is impressive. Nonetheless, Kiewe's characterizations of Jackson are occasionally questionable. At several points, he describes Jackson as a “progressive” (164, 178), an interpretation that is hard to sustain in light of Jackson's vigorous opposition to policies that would utilize government on behalf of national development and his plainly regressive attitudes and actions towards Indigenous peoples and the abolitionist cause. Kiewe's choice to analyze Jackson in the context of his times bolsters the book's primary strength; it allows for a thorough account of the dynamics and constraints of the era and how Jackson responded to them. However, some readers may be frustrated by Kiewe's hesitance to more forthrightly acknowledge Jackson's complicity with genocide and chattel slavery or to criticize the exclusionary definition of “the people” imagined by Jackson's populist rhetoric. For instance, Kiewe's recognition of Jackson's condescending, paternalistic attitude towards Indigenous peoples in chapter 6 may have been strengthened by conversing more extensively with texts such as Michael Rogin's Fathers and Children that explain the colonialist attitudes that underpinned Jackson's paternalism.As a book that sits “at the intersection of history, politics, and rhetoric,” Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal will prove useful to a variety of readers (1). Historians and scholars interested in the nineteenth-century United States may find this rhetorical study of Jackson a complement to other accounts of the era, as the book's special attention to the development of Jackson's addresses and their impact on the public is relatively unique. Scholars of the presidency may appreciate the book's intervention into the debate about the extent to which the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century affair or a phenomenon that can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Rhetorical scholars should appreciate the central place that Kiewe assigns rhetoric in the process of governance, even in an era where communication mediums were considerably more limited in reach and scope than today. Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal suggests that scholars should pay attention to how rhetoric can strengthen or weaken institutions such as the presidency, and how presidents influence and are influenced by evolving modes of mass communication. Above all, Kiewe's book highlights the need for scholars to conduct rigorous rhetorical analyses of other nineteenth-century rhetorical presidents, to enrich understanding of the era and to illustrate how rhetorical choices made centuries ago exert influence on the present-day institution of the presidency.

John Oddo's book argues that propaganda should be defined as an intertextual process. According to this perspective, a message succeeds as propaganda when people recontextualize it over and over, keeping that message alive across many texts. Of course, some messages achieve greater success as propaganda than others, and Oddo is interested in the linguistic and contextual factors that make certain messages “comparatively more worthy of recontextualization” (25). His focus is American propaganda justifying the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. In fact, Oddo's case studies explore a wide range of wartime materials, including print and television news, presidential speeches and political advertisements, and tweets by ordinary people. As such, his book will interest scholars studying war rhetoric as well as those interested in mediated discourse, multimodal analysis, political discourse, and circulation. In addition, this book illustrates how the inclusion of discourse analytic methods can work productively for rhetoricians interested in public address.In the introduction, Oddo states four goals. He seeks, first, to build upon insights of critical discourse analysis to develop an explicit definition of propaganda; second, to suggest a set of intertextual methods for studying propaganda; third, to draw attention to both contextual and sociolinguistic factors that give rise to propaganda; and finally, to challenge readers to consider the consequences of propaganda in a democratic society. Oddo argues that “one essential characteristic of successful propaganda is that it propagates” (3). In fact, his book's premise is that those who study propaganda should examine not only the content of messages but also the “rhetorical and sociolinguistic details” that reveal “how those messages spread, how they become mobile, durable, and repeatable” with the help of an institutional and ideological infrastructure (6, 3).Part 1 defines propaganda as an “intertextual process” in which manipulative and antidemocratic discourse is “recontextualized on a mass scale” (37). First, Oddo argues that an intertextual perspective can better account for both deliberate top–down propaganda and unwitting propaganda among ordinary people, preserving the notion that propaganda is harmful without presupposing that every propagandist seeks a selfish advantage. Building on theories of intertextuality, this section calls attention to the following question: “how do propagandists create discourse, whether strategically or unintentionally, that is likely to be recontextualized?” (22). Next, Oddo suggests that another key feature of propaganda is manipulation, which often involves positive self-representation and negative other-representation, emotional coercion, misleading representations and arguments, and manipulation of dialogic space (27–31). Finally, Oddo argues that propaganda should be defined by its antidemocratic societal consequences rather than intentions of the communicator. In other words, “it is propaganda if it consolidates the power of one group while harming the interests of subordinate groups” (34).Part 2 presents the first case study as it discusses how political propagandists create messages that are likely to be recontextualized by reporters. Oddo studies the iterations of the “incubator story,” a fabricated story in 1990 that accused Iraqi forces of removing Kuwaiti infants from their incubators and leaving them to die. He shows how the incubator story was staged as a credible narrative of personal experience. Moreover, Oddo shows that the narrative “could only succeed with the aid of journalists,” whose subsequent recontextualizations of the incubator story rendered it dominant and influential (71). Through a close analysis of linguistic discourse, multimodal semiotics, and intertextual relations between a public event and subsequent news reports, part 2 elucidates how powerful elites can induce a favorable uptake of their messages, inducing others to circulate them.Part 3 presents Oddo's second case study, which examines how TV news analysts before the 2003 Iraq War were presented as neutral experts, even though they held vested interests. Oddo argues that because news analysts are simultaneously journalists and political insiders, they, on the one hand, provide viewers with rare perspectives and penetrating insights, but, on the other, may circulate propaganda they hear from political sources (106). Oddo suggests that political propagandists exploit the dual identity of news analysts, offering them symbolic or material rewards and effectively compensating those who repeat their desired meanings (103). Meanwhile, news networks render the analysts credible and disinterested, highlighting their authority through advertising, on-screen titles, spoken introductions, background scenery, and communicative roles. Part 3 shows how this constructed authority together with incentivization from deliberate propagandists constitutes a form of manipulation, one that ultimately suppresses alternative views and enables mass recontextualization of propaganda.Part 4 presents Oddo's third case study and examines widespread publicity of the slogan “Support Our Troops.” Oddo argues that “Support Our Troops” has gained momentum for two reasons. First, it has “formal properties that make it more amenable to repetition—and, thus, more capable of traveling” (156). Second, it is surrounded by historical and cultural significance, reflecting larger wartime narratives in which the reasons for war are averted and dissent against war is demonized (156). Regarding the slogan's formal properties, Oddo shows how phonological, lexico-grammatical, and semantic factors contribute to the slogan's memorability, repeatability, and positive identification with a candidate, policy, or brand (156). Regarding cultural factors, Oddo examines the slogan as having ideographical functions by tracing its history in the Vietnam era and its continued use in both vertical campaigns (i.e., from the leaders at the top to the masses) and horizontal ones (i.e., spread among ordinary people on the same level). Oddo's discussion of the slogan sheds light on our understanding of similar slogans by encouraging attention to “the artful design of the slogan itself” and “the web of cultural meaning that shapes how people use and understand it” (175). Part 4 might interest scholars studying ideographs because it illustrates how a micro-analysis can facilitate analyses of phrases with ideological functions.Overall, the book has valuable pedagogical and theoretical implications. It provides an up-to-date discussion of propaganda studies. Its case studies are relatively independent and can be assigned separately. The author does not assume prior knowledge in his subject matter or methodology, which contributes to its accessibility. For these reasons, it can be used in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate classrooms concerning rhetorical analysis of political discourse or the combination of rhetorical and critical discourse analysis methods. For rhetoric scholars, this book contributes an intertextual perspective to their tool kit. This perspective can be applied beyond the specific cases of this book, calling attention to the transfer and transformation of messages across texts both in domestic contexts and international ones where power dynamics may have different manifestations. Overall, this book exemplifies and furthers Oddo's endeavors to show how rhetorical scholars can draw on sociolinguistics, multimodality, and micro-intertextual comparison to conduct granular analyses of political discourse that are critical of the political status quo and grounded in textual evidence.

This paper examines the multiliteracies practices () of 20 high school students who participated in a weeklong summer research institute at the start of a 6-month-long community-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) initiative. Data analyzed included 20 digital multimodal compositions produced by youths, individual interviews with youths, and observations of youths’ participation in the YPAR initiative. Data analysis utilized theories of multiliteracies practices () and culturally sustaining pedagogies () enacted across contexts of YPAR (). Findings contribute new insights about students’ multiliteracies practices in YPAR in two ways. First, we examine how learning about research methods shifted students’ understandings of research and the role their experiences could play in YPAR. Second, we examine how students’ digital literacies practices () supported them in generating new narratives about their community in digital multimodal compositions. Finally, we consider how insights gained from our examination may support educators in developing and enacting culturally sustaining () learning contexts that build with students’ multiliteracies practices as strengths while challenging persistent educational inequities.

This research assignment asks preservice undergraduate secondary education teachers in an applied grammar class to engage in a two-prong research project: a multimodal, interactive “poster” and a research paper that together explore the pedagogical possibilities for engaging with World Englishes in middle and high school classrooms. The prompt invites students to consider social justice and equity at the level of language. The assignment draws on both antiracist and queer pedagogies and examines the relationships among language, power, and resistance to linguistic oppression in the classroom. As students work through the assignment, they enact real-life stories of historical and contemporary figures from around the world who were forced to speak a colonizer’s language and resisted linguistic oppression. They then read articles focusing on Black Language, Indigenous languages, and World Englishes, which serve as touchstones for their own research. Although designed for a grammar pedagogy class, the assignment can be modified for multiple disciplines; at the end of the article, I provide several examples of how teachers outside English might modify the assignment for their own disciplinary contexts.