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December 2020

  1. Teacher Beliefs and Pedagogical Practices of Integrating Multimodality into First-Year Composition
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102614
  2. Writing to Make Meaning through Collaborative Multimodal Composing among Korean EFL Learners: Writing Processes, Writing Quality and Student Perception
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102609
  3. Embodied Subjectivities and the City: Intervening in Local Public Debates through Multimodality
    Abstract

    This article describes and reflects on a place-based pedagogical approach to public engagement that uses multimodal composition to insert new discourses into ongoing local debates over university expansion. The public-forming potential of multimodal texts encourages students to imagine new ways of being public and opportunities for adopting community-oriented subjectivities that engage with the issues, people, and spaces in neighborhoods adjacent to campus.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202031036

November 2020

  1. Multimodal Attitude in Digital Composition: Appraisal in Elementary English
    Abstract

    <p>Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two years with elementary students (ages 9 to 11 years). It examines students' application of semiotic knowledge of the appraisal framework to communicate attitudinal meanings multimodally through film. Attitudinal meanings in the appraisal framework are categorized as affect, judgment, or appreciation, and can be communicated through discourse and multimodal texts. The students learned to configure multiple modes, including speech, written text, image, gaze, facial expressions, body movement, posture, gesture, and sound, to communicate attitude in their films. The findings provide an exemplar for the teaching and analysis of students' filmmaking that applies systematic, multimodal grammars for communicating attitude. The findings are significant because interpersonal language is a major semiotic system of English, and visual texts now feature prominently in digital communication environments. </p>

    doi:10.58680/rte202031022
  2. Brown Girls Dreaming: Adolescent Black Girls’ Futuremaking through Multimodal Representations of Race, Gender, and Career Aspirations
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Brown Girls Dreaming: Adolescent Black Girls’ Futuremaking through Multimodal Representations of Race, Gender, and Career Aspirations, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/2/researchintheteachingofenglish31020-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/rte202031020

October 2020

  1. Research Video Abstracts in the Making: A Revised Move Analysis
    Abstract

    This article reports on a revised move analysis of a video abstract (VA) repository curated by Cell Press. The analysis reveals that the VA displays several distinct core moves, optional moves, and move units. The analysis suggests that albeit evidence being inconclusive due to the sample size, the VA is in effect an emerging genre whose implications for further research and practice are worth discussing. The article also questions the assumed analytic pertinence of move analysis to researching multimodal genres and cautions against the uncritical use of the VAs curated by leading academic publishers and journals in professional training.

    doi:10.1177/0047281619894981

September 2020

  1. Feature: Bringing the Community to the Classroom: Using Campus-Wide Collaborations to Foster Belonging for Dual Enrollment Students
    Abstract

    This article describes the experience of three professors teaching dual enrollment BTECH Early College High School students at Queensborough Community College, and our incorporation of departmental and campus-wide collaborative learning experiences as an intervention for student success and engagement. We present our collaborative approach to course design, culminating in the Upstanders Project, a multimodal research-based writing assignment incorporating on-campus cultural and learning resources. We argue that this approach led to an immersive learning experience for dual enrollment students that strengthened their ties to the college community.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc202030879
  2. Chicanx Murals: Decolonizing Place and (Re)Writing the Terms of Composition
    Abstract

    Drawing from an interpretive decolonial framework that understands multimodal writing as the act of creatingco-composedknowledge, this article analyzes Chicanx murals as multimodal compositions that exemplify the continuation of the Aztectlacuilolitztlipractice of writing with images. This work also invites rhetoric and composition scholars to reexamine Western understandings of history, particularly the history of writing.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202030893
  3. Where Disability Justice Resides: Building Ethical Asynchronous Tutor Feedback Practices within the Center
    Abstract

    This article argues the importance of viewing asynchronous screen-capture tutor feedback as a kairotic space that subverts normative views of time, writing process, and accepted tutoring practices such as a preference for non-directivity over directive feedback. The author argues that viewing asynchronous online feedback as “kairotic” enables writing center tutors to develop practices and pedagogies rooted in disability theory. The development of tutoring mindsets that embrace difference helps to support students with disabilities via asynchronous videos that mesh multimodal affordances with Universal Design principles. Keywords : Disability, neurodiversity, autism, Writing Centers, asynchronous online feedback, Universal Design, kairotic space

  4. Multimodality and The Writing Center’s Role in Restoring Justice for “Bad Writers”
    Abstract

    The writing center and multimodal projects play an integral role in restoring justice to students and giving them ownership over their own voices. Too often, students, especially students who need extra writing support, come into the composition classroom believing that they are “bad writers” because they struggle with the traditional academic essay. Oftentimes, these students initially feel overwhelmed by any assignments they are asked to complete in a composition course. Prior to college, many students only have exposure to the traditional academic essay, which epitomizes “good writing” for them, and this lack of exposure to other kinds of composing causes students to carry the baggage of failure. This is where the writing center comes in. Providing additional training to writing tutors to prepare them to work with students on multimodal projects allows them to begin the work of restoring justice because the “job of the tutor is to help human beings…” (Fitzgerald & Ianetta, 2016, p. 167). Students sometimes show up in the writing center with an assignment that asks them to make a poster presentation for their biology course, a podcast for their English course, or a video for an education course. By coaching students on multimodal assignments and working students through feelings of intimidation and the baggage of previous writing courses, the writing center teaches students to repurpose their existing skills and overcome obstacles to become confident, capable writers and composers. Keywords : writing center, multimodal, justice, voice, rhetoric, visual design, coaching, multimodal assignments, multimodality

  5. Designing a More Equitable Future
    Abstract

    Calls for antiracist pedagogies in university writing programs have gained attention and momentum in recent years. Many BIPOC scholars, and some white scholars, have been making arguments for more equitable university writing instruction and writing ecologies for decades. Yet, conditions have largely stayed the same. Undoing systemic racism in our institutions, programs, and ourselves is an individual and communal process that requires commitment and action. In this article, the authors describe a multiyear engagement with Equity-Centered Community Design, a framework offered by Creative Reaction Lab, that facilitates the process of seeing and recognizing systemic racism as intentionally designed to produce outcomes, so that what is designed may be dismantled and redesigned for equity. The multimodal composition of the article aims to convey the fluid, dynamic, and embodied process of doing this work that goes deeper and reaches farther than more typical writing center and writing program work. The goal is to offer a tool to writing centers, writing programs, departments, colleges, and beyond for turning antiracist support into antiracist realities. Keywords : Equity-Centered Community Design, antiracist pedagogy, writing centers, writing programs, design, equity Below is the preferred composition of this article. Please click in the in top right corner to open in a new tab and view as intended.

August 2020

  1. Sight, Sound, and Practice: An Exploration of the Ways Visualizations Can Support Learning to Compose
    Abstract

    Our invitation is to think about composing as inclusive of written texts, multimodal webtexts, and all the things writing and rhetoric folks would normally be asked to help students improve in creating. But for this experience, we don't want to stop there. We want you to also think about composing other things. Think about films. Think about dance choreography. Think about baking pies. Think about music. How do humans learn to compose these things? How can a visualization aid in learning these things?

June 2020

  1. The Use of Multimodal Resources by Technical Managers and Their Peers in Meetings Using English as the Business Lingua Franca
    Abstract

    Background: Engineers increasingly work and advance their careers in international business settings. As technical managers, they need management and technical skills when working with different stakeholders with whom they may not share a common first language. Studies have revealed that informal oral communication skills are of prime importance for global engineers who face challenges in building shared meaning and formulating clear messages in meetings with non-native speakers of English. This article proposes that studying the use of multimodal resources (spoken language, gaze, gestures, and objects) in meetings can unpack how work tasks are accomplished in business through different communicative strategies. Literature review: This paper focuses on engineers' and technical managers' needs and challenges in professional and intercultural communication where English is used as a business lingua franca (BELF) in multimodal meetings. While multimodal conversation and discourse analytic studies highlight the dynamic nature of meeting interaction, previous technical and professional communication and BELF research on multimodality is limited. Research questions: 1. How do technical managers use multimodal resources to articulate their ideas in BELF meetings with their peers? 2. How does the use of multimodal resources contribute to the construction of shared meaning in explanatory, consensus-seeking, and solution-finding communication? Methodology: This study reports on two case studies and multimodal discourse analysis of video-recorded meetings among technical managers and their peers in four companies. The use of multimodal resources is analyzed in explanatory, consensus-seeking, and solution-finding communication. Results and conclusions: In BELF meetings, assemblages of spoken language, gestures, tools, whiteboard, and documents contribute to constructing shared meaning. This study has implications for global professional and engineering communication. Future research should further examine multimodality in BELF meetings.

    doi:10.1109/tpc.2020.2988759
  2. Transfer across Media: Using Digital Video in the Teaching of Writing
    Abstract

    Transfer across Media: Using Digital Video in the Teaching of Writing presents digital composition as one pathway toward a better understanding of the transfer of writing knowledge. Through an in-depth study of the video composing experiences of eighteen students, the book illustrates how video provides useful opportunities for transfer across media through multimodal production.

  3. Dyslexia in the Writing Center: Multimodal Strategies
    Abstract

    This article is meant to serve as a practical guide for writing center practitioners and provide strategies to help make writing centers more accessible for all learners. These strategies specifically focus on ways to increase accessibility for dyslexic individuals , regardless of whether the writer has disclosed their disability or not.

April 2020

  1. Exploring Visual Framing Strategies, Sentiment, and Product Presentation Modality in Instagram Posts of Fashion Influencers
    Abstract

    A highly visual social media platform such as Instagram is incorporated by many companies in their marketing communications strategies to advertise their products and services employing digital visual rhetoric. The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of visual framing strategies, sentiment, and product presentation modality in the multicultural context by examining social media practices of influencers belonging to two cultural backgrounds, namely the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates. Using content analysis, this study reveals visual rhetorical strategies practiced by Instagram influencers that can equip digital marketing practitioners with effective devices of persuasion. The study provides a useful contribution to the theory of digital visual rhetoric.

    doi:10.29107/rr2020.1.6
  2. Visual Embodied Actions in Interview-Based Writing Research: A Methodological Argument for Video
    Abstract

    People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I synthesize research that examines how visual embodied actions reveal and construct embodied knowledge and stance, and I apply these lenses to my own study, showing how visual embodied actions are essential to understanding three writers’ experiences with particular writing styles. I conclude by discussing the benefits of videorecording for writing research, offering guidance on how video can help researchers explore the interview as a social practice, and suggesting ways to design the consent process with transparency and democratic practice in mind. Ultimately, this article serves as a guide for writing researchers who wish to challenge the audio default when conducting interviews.

    doi:10.1177/0741088319898864
  3. Multimodal Language of Attitude in Digital Composition
    Abstract

    Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic resources for communicating attitude multimodally. The research participants were 68 students (ages 9–11 years) from two elementary schools. Students learned how to use attitudinal language—affect, judgment, and appreciation—and applied this knowledge to multimodal design. The findings advance a leading system of appraisal for discourse by adapting the system to the multimodal communication of attitude in digital comic making in schooling. The research is significant because it demonstrates the potentials for augmenting students’ linguistic and visual semiotic resources to convey multimodal attitudinal meanings in contemporary communication.

    doi:10.1177/0741088319897978

March 2020

  1. A View from the Hill: “One Shot” Harris and the Pittsburgh Courier
    Abstract

    Charles "Teenie" Harris spent more than three decades as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, capturing through his camera lens both once-in-a-lifetime and everyday occurrences in the city. The Courier played an active role in the lives of many African Americans in Pittsburgh, promoting local and national news, sports, and entertainment that represented their communities. Using a selection of Harris's photos, this essay begins by identifying the self-evidently political images in his oeuvre. It then theorizes what I refer to as idiomatic visual rhetorical strategies of representation that manifest in less obvious places: images of women and children whose celebrations and struggles were not likely to be publicized outside their own neighborhoods. Through the introduction of idiomatic representational strategies, this essay contributes to efforts in visual rhetorics to refine methodologies for interpreting images, and it also furthers historiographies of African American rhetorics.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1725614
  2. Layering Additional Tracks: A Review of Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening
  3. Using Adapted Studio Critique to Teach Peer Review in the Document Design Classroom
    Abstract

    Introduction: Given the importance of visual communication to technical communicators' work, 40% of undergraduate programs in technical and professional communication require a document design course. However, document design pedagogies such as structuring peer review are still being researched, and popular textbooks do not provide instruction about how to facilitate this important pedagogy. About the case: An adapted form of studio critique was used to provide students with design feedback. Situating the case: Studio critique literature and document design peer review scholarship were used to devise an adapted critique, which I implemented in my course. Methods/approach: Twenty-five undergraduates were surveyed, and 23 were interviewed about adapted critique. Results/discussion: Results were favorable but recommend extending critique time, better facilitating participation, capturing feedback effectively, focusing the presentation, evaluating feedback, and requesting revision plans. Conclusions: Future research includes expanding the study to other courses and online environments.

    doi:10.1109/tpc.2019.2961012
  4. Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures by Jean Bessette
    Abstract

    Book Reviews Jean Bessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, 202 pp. ISBN 9780809336234 Since queer, feminist, and rhetorical scholars have "returned" to the archive over the past twenty years, Bessette's book brings queer and feminist archival theories to bear on rhetorical studies. Bessette is concerned with how lesbian collectives have composed a past for themselves and oriented themselves toward new possibilities for identification that could challenge "then-present social and political denigrations of same-sex desire and rela­ tionships" (2). The result is a retooling of familiar rhetorical concepts for the study and historiographic consideration of queer and feminist collective pasts. Bessette's rewriting of archival logics through rhetorical concepts is useful for both queer rhetoricians and wider archival studies. Particularly, her read­ ing of identification through retroactivism and the notion of "documenting the search" offer new approaches for any archival engagement (125). The book begins with the theoretical insights of queer and feminist archival scholarship before turning to specific technologies in each chapter that offer insights into the retroactivist impulses of lesbian rhetors and lesbian communities. Bessette begins by drawing on Lucas Hilderbrand's "retroactivism," a concept that Hilderbrand uses to engage his longings for a personal and nostalgic queer past. Bessette links retroactivism to the account of identifica­ tion given by Kenneth Burke to argue that grassroots collectives sought the "displacement—and replacing—of pejorative accounts of lesbianism with new versions of the past" (10). These revisions of the past were marshalled to produce different definitions of lesbianism and open space for alternative futures. She argues that rhetorical studies, and particularly Burke's under­ standing of identification, already offer the requisite tools for engagements with queer archives. Chapter one contends that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's influential book LesbianANoman is itself an archive. Bessette reads the short personal stories contained in LesbianANoman as anecdotes that demonstrate the ephemeraUty of the queer archive (26). She argues that these anecdotes were arranged to produce a respectable white middle-class narrative of lesbian identity, in line with the goals of its authors who were leaders in the Daughters of Bilitis. This identity was framed to challenge dominant homophobic social narratives, and Bessette centers the function of exclusion in identification. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVhl, Issue 2, pp. 225-234. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.38.2.225 226 RHETORICA Whereas chapter one addresses a printed text as archive, chapter two turns to a "place-based" understanding of archives through a reading of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) and the June L. Mazer Archives (JLMA). Bessette argues that classification in the LHA, an archive which accepts "any­ thing a lesbian has touched," operates as a "rhetorical topos" which "blurs the boundaries between archival categories, creating the conditions for a genera­ tive, flexible identity" (61). Bessette contends that the LHA offers the possibil­ ity of making seemingly disparate connections through browsing. Bessette then turns to the JLMA and a photograph collage from Ester Bentley that sits in view outside of the domain of a particular collection. Due to its position, she argues that these photos instill in visitors a sense of possibility for historical connection that crosses the categories of the archive. The chapter concludes with a brief review of the JLMA's recent partnership with UCLA. Bessette suggests that the queemess of the JLMA's collection may be lost when viewing their materials in UCLA's straight, institutional reading room, a point I believe needs additional substantiation. Chapter three turns to documentary films and their "fabrication of the past" (95). Bessette reads these films as allowing for a composition of lesbian histories that challenge "dependencies upon lesbian history for present sexual identification" (97). Bessette analyzes five historiographic lesbian films through a relevant multimodal rhetorical strategy. The films and their respective strategies include "unstable identity categories" in The Female...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0020
  5. Tracing Ecologies of Code Literacy and Constraint in Emojis as Multimodal Public Pedagogy
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102552
  6. “I Never Know What to Expect”: Aleatory Identity Play in Fortnite and Its Implications for Multimodal Composition
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102550

February 2020

  1. Toward a heuristic for teaching the visual rhetoric of pitch decks: a pedagogical approach in entrepreneurship communication
    Abstract

    This study examined how three successful entrepreneurs/investors assessed the visual rhetoric of actual pitch decks from novice entrepreneurs. We compare their evaluations to the result of a heuristic for assessing visual rhetoric, Color CRAYONTIP. While the pitch deck is recognized as a key artifact in entrepreneurship, no studies have specifically addressed the visual design of the deck nor the key design skills novice entrepreneurs should implement to effectively persuade potential investors of the idea's promise. This preliminary and exploratory case study begins a dialogue on this topic by performing a visual analysis of seven novice decks which were deemed successful by experienced angel investors. The analysis revealed five key skills that appear to account for the success of these decks with the reviewers: rhetorical awareness, typography, color, photography, and contrast.

    doi:10.1145/3363790.3363791

January 2020

  1. Resilient Turns: Epistrophe, Incrementum, Metonymy
    Abstract

    In this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on linguistic patterns while simultaneously attending to material ones. Focusing on the trope of metonymy and the figures of incrementum and epistrophe, we show how these devices represent different modes of material-semiotic addressivity, resiliently turning and reconfiguring the rhetorical ecologies they capacitate. Using three case studies—a corpus of news articles about water quality amid extensive wind turbine development in Chatham-Kent, Ontario; traditional and “rogue” pain scales; and scientific literature about CRISPR—we explore the stylistic affordances of epistrophe, incrementum, and metonymy, showing how these “turnings” allow resilient material-semiotic articulations. We conclude by suggesting how our framework may be applied and extended to other topics and how this understanding of tropes and figures may align with other research trajectories in RSTM.

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1300
  2. A Collaborative Approach to Supporting L2 Students With Multimodal Work in the Composition Classroom and the Writing Center
    Abstract

    Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university’s writing center (WC) director, share their different but parallel paths to “going multimodal” for the first time. They show how they joined forces to determine how best to teach and respond to students’ diverse multimodal projects. First, Christina explains how she taught herself and her students about multimodal rhetoric and genres with the help of two dedicated WC tutors. She also outlines how she created a rubric to respond to students’ projects throughout their composing processes. Then Lucie shares her initial hesitancy about going multimodal and how she ultimately prepared her tutors to respond to the projects that Christina’s students presented. The article concludes with Christina and Lucie discussing the exciting synergy they experienced while working together and with the tutors and the challenges they faced. For composition instructors, tutors, and WC directors interested in adopting multimodal assignments, this article provides ideas and suggestions for teaching, giving feedback, and mentoring.

  3. The Muted Group Video Project: Amplifying the Voices of Latinx Immigrant Students
    Abstract

    During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class predominantly made up of immigrant students. The videos spotlight the students’ personal experiences with immigration, incorporate multiple languages, and explore themes such as cultural diversity and welcoming immigrant students into the classroom. Following the creation of the videos, the college students participated in a video chat with the third graders. This article offers an overview of the video project, student reflections, and guidelines for future pedagogical implementation. In addition, I reflect on the importance of pedagogical flexibility in the classroom and the ways in which multilingualism can expand our understanding of multimodality.

    doi:10.59236/rjv19i2pp66-80
  4. Activist Archival Research, Environmental Intervention, and the Flint Water Crisis
    Abstract

    As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form of community engagement. The case study presented here, which focuses on local activist writing (broadly conceived) in response to the Flint water crisis, illustrates one possibility for how activist archival research might be undertaken. Specifically, it highlights the tactics of black and working-class community members who joined together to make apparent how water contamination was affecting their own bodies, families, and communities through complex, multimodal interventions online and in the Flint community. Furthermore, this article emphasizes why such research is necessary and important, particularly when the embodied, scientific, and cultural knowledges of marginalized community members are represented little, if at all, in mainstream media coverage and normative rhetorics of risk.

    doi:10.59236/rjv19i2pp208-239
  5. Locating visual communication across disciplines: How visual instruction in composition textbooks differs from that in science-writing textbooks
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.1-2.05
  6. Theorizing WAC faculty development in multimodal project design
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.1-2.04

2020

  1. Review of Multimodal Composing: Strategies for Twenty-First-Century Writing Consultations , edited by Lindsay A. Sabatino and Brian Fallon
  2. Incorporating Visual Literacy in the First-Year Writing Classroom Through Collaborative Instruction
    Abstract

    This article proposes a model for collaboration between composition instructors and instructional librarians to promote visual literacy instruction in first-year writing courses. While the creation of visual content is essential to digital composing technologies, it often remains underutilized as a tool for writing development in first-year curricula. Drawing from complementary threshold concepts outlined in composition scholarship and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy , we demonstrate how librarians and writing instructors can engage in collaborative instruction to bridge gaps between theory and practice and leverage existing institutional expertise to support multimodal instruction in first-year writing.

  3. Working Toward Social Justice through Multilingualism, Multimodality, and Accessibility in Writing Classrooms
    Abstract

    This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional (Crenshaw; Martinez) and interdependent (Jung; Wheeler) approaches that put language diversity and disability in conversation (Cioè-Peña). Each of us shares two pedagogical examples that consider language diversity/difference and embodied diversity/difference as unified concepts. Our pedagogical examples include projects related to multimodal and digital rhetoric, multilingual/multimodal community engagement, reflecting on communication differences, and analyzing multimodal/multilingual communication in practice. Through what we call intersectional, interdependent approaches to accessibility in writing classrooms, students and teachers can honor the multitude of valuable communication practices that students engage in within and beyond the English writing classroom.

  4. MULTIMODAL UN/COMPOSITION'S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY: CURATING QUEER ZINES AND A POLITICS OF IM/POSSIBILITY

December 2019

  1. The Public Trial and Execution of Arthur Greiser in Poznań: Visual Rhetoric of Documentary Photography and Local Memory
    Abstract

    On the example of the ethically controversial photographs made by Zbigniew Zielonacki from the public trial and execution of Arthur Greiser, the Nazi deputy in the Wartheland, the author demonstrates the visuality of local memory at the intersection of the narrative and non-narrative, private and public, individual and collective sphere. The photographs have become an inherent element of Poznań inhabitants’ memory of World War II and its outcomes, although they did not fit any of the emerging main war narratives.

    doi:10.29107/rr2019.4.1
  2. Brand aesthetics in visual communication – a Polish case study of Disney's anniversary event
    Abstract

    In 2018 Mickey Mouse, an iconic brand hero of Disney, celebrated the 90th birthday anniversary in the National Film Archive – Audio-Visual Institute (Pol. FINA) in Warsaw, Poland. By this occasion, the global corporation positioned itself in the local public domain as a social agent through cooperation with the mentioned national institution. The glocalisation strategy has been reflected in the PR activities and has found its visual form in specific PR tools. The paper aims to analyse this case study as the exemplification of a successful implementation of organisational aesthetics in the public realm. The paper analyses the global organization’s visual communication practice in the local framework.

    doi:10.29107/rr2019.4.5
  3. Medical Rhetoric and the Sympathetic “Inebriet”: 1870–1930
    Abstract

    The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the sec­ond half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a dis­interested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical jour­nals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced under­standing of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those sys­tems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction.

    doi:10.5744/rhm.2019.1019
  4. Employers’ Perspectives on Workplace Communication Skills: The Meaning of Communication Skills
    Abstract

    Employers provide their interpretation of the meaning of communication skills in this qualitative study of 22 managers. Employers understand written communication to be types of documents, a way to write, and a mode of communication. Oral communication skills mean a style of interacting, presenting, and conducting meetings. Visual communication skills were understood to be data visualization or nonverbal communication. Electronic communication was interpreted as email. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by highlighting areas where meaning converges for employers and instructors. Faculty members in communication disciplines can incorporate these findings into their course design and learning outcome discussions.

    doi:10.1177/2329490619851119

October 2019

  1. Visual Rhetoric as Performance
    Abstract

    This article examines the use of comic adaptations of Shakespeare in the college classroom. After theorizing the class offering based upon performance pedagogy and inclusive learning practices, the author describes her experience coteaching a Shakespeare class that used three Shakespeare plays in both their traditional and graphic format. The success of the course revealed that comic adaptations of Shakespeare plays offer an accessible, rewarding means of understanding Shakespeare’s plays as both texts to be read and works to be performed.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-7615587

September 2019

  1. Review: Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres
    doi:10.1007/s10503-019-09485-z
  2. Selections From the ABC 2018 Annual Conference, Miami, Florida: Bridging Teaching Ideas From the Innovator to the Classroom
    Abstract

    This article offers readers 13 My Favorite Assignments that were presented at the Association for Business Communication’s 83rd annual conference held in Miami, Florida, in 2018. The teaching innovations offered include assignments that present quick, fun icebreaker exercises; visual communication and diversity; rhetoric; email; and informational interviews. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

    doi:10.1177/2329490619833378
  3. Feature: All Truly Great Thoughts Are Conceived While Walking1”: Academic Inclusion through Multimodal Walkabouts
    Abstract

    This article explores the value of including creative assignments in the composition classroom. Specifically, it demonstrates how a multimodal assignment can help struggling students develop the confidence to succeed on creative assignments and on subsequent more traditional academic assignments.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc201930321

August 2019

  1. Metalepsis in Elementary Students’ Multimodal Narrative Representations
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Metalepsis in Elementary Students' Multimodal Narrative Representations, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30239-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/rte201930239

July 2019

  1. The Internal Rhetorical Work of a Public Health Crisis Response
    Abstract

    This persuasion brief suggests that the rhetorical concepts of techne and rhetorical work facilitate the creation of public health crisis communication. To illustrate this claim, we present findings from a case study with the Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, a transdisciplinary group that collaborated with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola crisis. The team created multimodal documentation to support healthcare providers as they prepared to treat patients and crafted communication to alleviate the fear among health workers and the public caused by the threat of Ebola. Ultimately, we frame public health crisis communication as a rhetorical endeavor guided by a focus on failure, situated expertise, and techne. This focus pushes specialists to tend to the processes involved in creating a response, and it highlights how gut feelings factor into the process of designing and implementing a public health crisis intervention.

    doi:10.5744/rhm.2019.1008

June 2019

  1. The Grind of Multimodal Work in Professional Writing Pedagogies
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2019.01.007
  2. Redefining Writing for the Responsive Workplace
    Abstract

    In this article we argue that mobile, design, content, and social media technologies have fundamentally redefined the role of the writer in the workplace. Rather than the originator of content, the writer is becoming a sort of multimodal editor who revises, redesigns, remediates, and upcycles content into new forms, for new audiences, purposes, and media. This article discusses data gathered from over one hundred hours of embedded workplace research shadowing nine different professional communicators. The data demonstrate the iterative, detailed, product-focused types of work happening within a range of workplace constraints and, in turn, emphasize the need for writers and teachers of writing to recognize the importance of developing a broad skillset to prepare for this kind of work.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201930182

April 2019

  1. “Presenting Our Perspective”: Recontextualizing Youths’ Experiences of Hypercriminalization Through Media Production
    Abstract

    In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization—the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as “always-already criminal.” We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called POPPYN, specifically a 2014 episode focusing on youth and the criminal justice system, using tools from recontextualization analysis and multimodal semiotics, which together allow us to index the substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions of component elements of social practices. Through investigation of linguistic and multimodal processes that represent social actors, actions, and constructions of their legitimacy, this study demonstrates ways that media making can serve as a tool for youth of color to process and rewrite persistent hypercriminalizing positionings in more agentive and hopeful ways. We end by proposing implications for multimodal literacy practices and pedagogies.

    doi:10.1177/0741088319827594
  2. Negotiating Communicative Access in Practice: A Study of a Memoir Group for People With Aphasia
    Abstract

    Resulting from stroke or brain injury, aphasia affects individuals’ ability to produce and comprehend language, but it also creates profound social changes, limiting individuals’ opportunities to communicate or to be seen as capable of communication. To address these challenges, the field of communicative sciences and disorders (CSD) has sought to ensure “communicative access” by reducing barriers to communication. This article, through an analysis of the communicative practices of participants in a memoir group for people with aphasia, develops a nuanced conception of communicative access as a process of negotiation across individuals and modes and not just as a process of reducing barriers. The study shows, specifically, that rather than the mere presence of multiple semiotic resources enabling communicative access, individuals enact access by flexibly shifting between modes to take advantage of various kinds of affordances that best suit their needs. This willingness to use modes in atypical or nonnormative ways importantly challenges the very idea of “normal” communication. The theory of communicative access developed in this article melds (a) a CSD understanding of communication as social and tied inextricably to identity with (b) a disability studies conception of access as an ongoing, negotiated process and with (c) a writing studies emphasis on literate, communicative activity as complexly layered, distributed, negotiated, and (multi)semiotic.

    doi:10.1177/0741088318823210

March 2019

  1. Body Rhetorics and Kinesthetic Empathy in the Video Game Bound (2016)
    Abstract

    Dance is found in every known human culture as part of religious, social and healing ceremonies. The increased interest in the role of dance in western psychology corresponds with the creation of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) founded by Marian Chace, and the beginning of the dance movement therapy (DMT). The Association introduced the dance and the dance-based movement as part of the therapeutic process, in order to explore the relationship between the expression of individual emotions and movement. Drawing both from the visual rhetorics approach (Patterson and Corning 1997) and the game studies (Fernández-Vara 2009) I will analyze the multiple narrative layers in the Bound video game (2016), pointing to the mutual relationship the player and the game have on each other (Keogh 2018) decoding the game as a metaphor for the therapeutic effects of dance.

    doi:10.29107/rr2019.1.2