This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class, we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling, and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class, we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts, and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale, this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge, experiences, and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

Increasingly popular, corequisite models include a college-credit course and a support course taken concurrently; to ensure purposeful alignment in the design of such course pairings, one practical suggestion is a curriculum crosswalk.

This article explores six years of student data to discover why students who appear not to have read a lengthy book are able to execute a successful paper designed around that text.

AbstractThis article addresses the challenges of fake news and echo chambers in the digital age by exploring the possibility that susceptibility to misinformation derives not from an inevitable fault in the medium of digital publishing but, rather, from the slower development and adoption of pedagogies that leverage digital tools for reading. The authors examined student annotations and argue that focusing on reading using collaborative digital annotation can stimulate knowledge acquisition and personal belief formation and, further, can assist educators to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and intervene where needed. Digital annotation tools promote affective and cognitive engagement with texts and enable both instructor-to-peer and peer-to-peer modeling of reading strategies.

This article examines a targeted drought awareness campaign by the city of Cape Town in South Africa to prevent a looming water crisis dubbed Day Zero. Using rhetorical criticism and commonplaces, the article analyzes the design and (rhetorical)circulation of artifacts that heightened public awareness of the crisis, helped shape the public mindset, and galvanized collective action to prevent Day Zero. For one city in Africa to avert a water crisis through a rhetorically orchestrated set of technological, scientific, and civic interventions is significant for (among others) technical communicators who need to know not simply that it was done, but how rhetoric helped avert Day Zero.

This study details a method for mHealth app development and user experience design (UX) evaluation, which generates a comprehensive list of stakeholder-users, acknowledges UX barriers, advocates multiple methods, and argues that developers should address the UX needs of each stakeholder-user in a complex health-care system. A case study of a research project on an mHealth app for women who are considering prevention of or treatment for osteoporosis assists to elaborate and define the method. To find any measure of success, a fully functional app for older users should be integrated into the entire health-care system.

Research shows that Western and Chinese user instructions use visuals differently. Two basic tendencies may be discerned: Chinese manuals place more emphasis on visuals and their selection of visuals is less strictly confined to usability related functionality. This study investigates whether such cultural differences correspond to user preferences. Three hypotheses were tested: (a) Chinese users value pictures more than Western users; (b) Chinese users appreciate diverting, cartoon-like pictures more than Western users; and (c) Western users appreciate strictly instrumental pictures more than Chinese users. To test these hypotheses, a quasi-experiment ( N = 158) was conducted with cultural background as independent variable and appreciation for pictures as dependent variable. All participants rated 15 pictures, which were presented in the context of user instructions. All three hypotheses were confirmed. Cultural differences regarding the use of visuals should therefore be taken into account when localizing Western manuals for the Chinese market, or vice versa.

University business incubators (UBIs) are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. UBIs facilitate the launch of start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. This study uses assemblage theory to profile four UBIs. Its findings concern their process of exporting incubation models and training transnational entrepreneurs, the roles of alumni and students, and the genres and conventions of entrepreneurship.

In this article, an analysis of multimodal representations in elementary school students’ descriptive texts about the mobile game Pokémon Go (PG) is used to discuss youths’ new literacy practices emerging from their out-of-school experiences (e.g., gaming, producing game-walkthroughs, and fan art). Social semiotic multimodal analyses of two students’ PG texts and their participation in talks around their texts are used to exemplify what occurs semiotically in the translation of meanings and designs across modes, media, and sites. Combining the analysis of the meaning potentials of multimodal representations with ethnographic accounts of their use in context produces the following findings: The PG writing task connects with the students’ life-worlds and the gaming context around PG prompts the design of their multimodal representations. The students are active creators of content and demonstrate purposeful and innovative uses of semiotic resources in self-representation, stance taking, and audience awareness. The iPad facilitates multimodal and digital crossovers between leisure activities and school subjects. The concluding discussion suggests how game-based literacy practices could be transferred into academic settings.

This article argues that two principles of a trauma-informed writing pedagogy grounded in clinical scholarship—instructor as buffering role model and psychologically safer classroom spaces—can support students affected by trauma and traumatic stress. Moreover, when these principles are embedded in course structures using concepts central to universal design, they can support all community college writing students facing adversity.

AbstractRhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, U.S. normativity? Studying non-U.S., non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-U.S. normativity.

Abstract In this conversation series, we discuss some of the enduring and evolving interests that the subfield of visual rhetoric provokes for us. We begin with how we found visual rhetoric; questions of disciplinarity and methodology; issues of archive and field; concerns about the objects and scenes for visual rhetoric; and conclude with a focus on the future, core and evolving concepts, and pedagogy.

Abstract We argue that part of Rhetoric & Public Affairs’ future should center public-facing scholarship in rhetorical studies. We begin by chronicling some of the work colleagues are doing to bridge expert and lay publics: podcasts, popular and trade press interviews, social media content development and management, and activist engagements. Centering public-facing scholarship creates several notable shifts: (1) it changes the “so what?” for traditional scholarship by inviting scholars to think about audiences outside of journal readership; (2) it opens space for different stylistic conventions in scholarly writing; and (3) it indicates that nonexpert audiences are valuable as readers. We note the considerable barriers to entry to public scholarship including gatekeeping, framing public scholarship for tenure, and training. We contend that Rhetoric & Public Affairs could lead other journals through an updated definition of impact that takes into account contemporary modes of circulation and sharing, should accept pieces written for nonexpert readers in rhetoric, and should consider, if possible, making available for public reading one scholarly article every month or every quarter.

The prevalence of high-stakes testing, scripted curricula, and accountability measures in schools discourages experimentation with curriculum. This article encourages curriculum design experimentation in teacher education by proposing playful practices, game-like activities for designing curriculum that draws on students’ out-of-school literacies. We explore the benefits and challenges of game-based curriculum design with preservice teachers (PSTs; N = 19) in two public university secondary English education courses and trace one PST’s take-up of the curriculum design moves through incorporation of these playful practices into her classroom. Data collection occurred across one academic year and included field and observation notes, written reflections, interview data, and artifacts. Findings show the potential for game-based curriculum design in literacy teacher education to (1) create an imaginative space between teacher and student, (2) encourage collaborative production, (3) connect PST university coursework to classroom practice, (4) support students’ creative language production, and (5) create playful social contexts for participatory learning. Challenges highlight the importance of attending to power dynamics in game play and design. Implications include how game-based pedagogical invitations in teacher education can help PSTs imagine new ways to organize classroom structures and literacy learning experiences that value an interplay of youth cultures and classroom curriculum.

In Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines and Academic Literacies, researchers have produced compelling evidence of the disjunction between faculty members’ assertions that good writing is universal—i.e., the autonomous model of literacy—and faculty’s own tacit practice of discipline-specific conventions. In studies of race and language in education, scholars have identified disconnections between what teachers profess to value—e.g., students’ right to their own language—and how they actually grade. Contradictions are a natural part of any ideology, and these are commonly understood to demonstrate the resilience of the autonomous model. In this article, however, I introduce a set of theoretical tools from the sociology of scientific knowledge—namely, the concept of interpretative repertoires and of variability in participants’ interpretations as an analytic resource—that can reveal cracks in the autonomous model. Although these tools are over thirty years old, they have not circulated widely in literacy and composition studies. I apply the tools to text-based interviews with two faculty writers who had espoused universal “rules” for writing. After identifying apparent disconnections between the rules and their own practices or those of other writers with whom they worked, I present this evidence to them and analyze their explanations: They maintain that the rules still apply, but their accounts are complex, shifting, and self-contradictory. These case studies reveal, rather than its strength, the inherent instability of the autonomous model. Ultimately, I hope that these research tools can, in conjunction with systemic efforts, aid in dismantling the construct of “good writing” and its inherent privileging of white language practices.

This paper examines three students’ multimodal composition experiences in Basic Writing where conceptions of literacy interacted with moments related to transfer across media. Extending Brian V. Street’s work on literacy and Rebecca S. Nowacek’s transfer theory to multimodal composition through video, we use analysis of ethnographic data to conclude that for some students, video facilitated both a robust conception of literacy as ideological and transfer across media. For others, external forces inhibited opportunities for transfer and reinforced a conception of literacy as autonomous. We close reflecting on how we might more usefully scaffold student learning for transfer and more complex conceptions of literacy.

This article focuses on how Street’s naming and delineation of the concept of “literacy practices” and the “ideological model” of literacy enable us to see and understand the literacy work of two 19th century African American women “literacy workers.” It introduces and provides an overview of the work of Frances (Fanny) Jackson Coppin and Hallie Quinn Brown and seeks to add early Black feminist voices of literacy workers in spaces often left out of dominant discourses around literacy. This article reveals how literacy for African American was, and is, tied to political, and social survival of a people.

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

This essay proposes a model of university-community partnership called “an engaged swarm” that mobilizes networks of students from across classes and disciplines to work with off-campus partners such as nonprofits. Based on theories that translate the distributed, adaptive, and flexible activity of actors in biological systems to organizational networks that include humans, swarms are well-suited to providing a diverse range of responses to complex problems. As such, swarming tactics can be useful when applied to nonprofit organizations that do not have the capacity or time to redesign their communications strategy across print, web, and social media platforms. Employing a case study of three classes that collectively produced a wide range of multimedia artifacts for a nonprofit in a single semester, the essay illustrates how a swarm embedded within a university operates, and concludes by providing a schema for modifying swarms to future partnerships.

From our perspectives at the University of Louisville, we address the need to provide structures for graduate student participation in community-engaged scholarship. Architectures of participation such as the ones we describe in this piece—the Community Engagement Academy and the Digital Media Academy—offer graduate students the opportunity to practice designing and implementing community engagement projects within interdisciplinary and disciplinary sites. The models we provide were designed to make the invisible work of community engagement visible and to create low barriers of entry for graduate students to become stewards of their disciplines as well as stewards of their communities. Such opportunities, we argue, help promote a more capacious view of stewardship, and thus encourage emerging engaged scholars to learn how to act responsibly and wisely in conducting communityengaged research.

Critical language awareness offers one approach to communaljusticing, an iterative and collective process that can address inequities in the disciplinary infrastructure of Writing Studies. We demonstrate justicing in the field’s pasts, policies, and publications; offer a model of communal revision; and invite readers to become agents of communal justicing.

Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

This article proposes that writing instructors can present genre innovation as a strategy for asserting class (and other) identities within academic discourses. Drawing on sample student innovations of integrating emotions, expanding modes, and reconstructing audiences, this pedagogical approach seeks to value varied class identities and increase multivocality in academe.

The Truman Commission created the modern community college in 1947 to democratize our system of higher education in America. Before this moment, higher education was thoroughly segregated by race, class, and gender. The modern open-admissions two-year college cannot, therefore, be understood simply as a convenient, low-cost alternative to four-year colleges. It is—by mission and mandate—a social justice institution.

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master’s students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate students who are studying multimedia production skills. The author piloted the collaborative project model during a recent academic term. Student response to the format was overwhelmingly positive from both graduates and undergraduates, and the resulting projects were of exceptional quality and well received by their respective clients.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

In spring 2020, not only did the teleconferencing platform Zoom experience an onslaught of new users who were now social distancing due to the COVID-19 crisis, but it also faced its own crisis due to the privacy of its product. For those working in technical and professional communication, the Zoom example illustrates not only a way to communicate in an emergency but also a way that privacy can cause a crisis in the first place. Drawing from literature on crisis communication and the experiences users described in the Zoom CEO’s blog post, the author concludes that while Zoom did indeed have technical issues that contributed to its privacy crisis, users also experienced its technology in unexpected ways, and the company underestimated the privacy expectations of its new users. Zoom’s privacy crisis ultimately provides a useful discussion of why it is increasingly important for companies to incorporate privacy by design and to be frank about their privacy practices with a public who has a growing interest in, and dissatisfaction with, corporate privacy practices.

This article reports findings from an institutional ethnography of university stakeholders’ writing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the affordances of this methodology for professional and technical communication. Drawing on interview transcripts with faculty and administrators from across the university, the authors contextualize the role of writing in the iterative, collaborative, distributed writing processes by which the university transitioned from a traditional A–F grading scheme to a pass or fail option in just a few business days. They analyze these stakeholders’ experiences, discussing some effects of this accelerated timeline on policy development, writing processes, and uses of writing technologies within this new context of remote teaching and learning.

The central components of an interpersonal communication framework such as uncertainty reduction theory can be adapted to design and evaluate crisis communication addressing uncertainty between citizens needing access to services and organizations attempting to manage risk and ensure continuity of operations. Through a content analysis of organizational crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article adapts uncertainty reduction theory as an applied, user-centered framework that can guide technical communicators in managing uncertainty during unprecedented crises.

This article employs cross-cultural communication approaches to teaching instructional design in the times of COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on instructions from France, India, Spain, and the United States for making protective masks, the authors highlight how the writers and designers of these four documents from each culture approach their audiences, organize their DIY instructions, make language choices, employ images and other illustration devices, and culturally persuade users. While acknowledging cultural differences, the authors urge students to identify and adopt design strengths from diverse cultures in their own ideas about composing instructions.

What expectations should professionals and the public place on visuals to communicate the uncertainties of complex phenomena? This article demonstrates how charts during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic articulated visual arguments yet also required extended communicative support upon their delivery. The author examines one well-circulated chart comparing COVID-19 case trends per country and highlights its rhetoric by contrasting its design decisions with those of other charts and reports created as the pandemic initially unfolded. To help nonexpert audiences, the author suggests that professional communicators and designers incorporate more contextual information about the data and notable design choices.

This article reviews images of people of Asian descent wearing masks in popular press articles discussing mask shortages and argues that visual framing had the potential of fueling racial antagonism during the initial months of COVID-19’s spread across the United States. Technical communicators need to include globalized perspectives in educational materials about masks as an advocacy strategy that can help communities and individuals to navigate the crisis situation and better protect themselves and those around them.

This article addresses how social media platforms can better highlight expert voices through design choices. Misinformation, after all, has exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, and platforms have struggled to address the issue. The authors examine this critical gap in validation mechanisms in the current social media platforms and suggest possible solutions for this urgent problem with third-party partnerships.

Analyzing data gathered around COVID-19 can increase our understanding of its spread and the social and economic impacts. Data visualizations can help various stakeholders understand the outbreak. To this end, this article seeks to understand how COVID-19 data dashboards utilized actionable metrics to inform various stakeholders. Used in lean methodology, actionable metrics specifically tie data visualization to actions to improve a specific situation. The authors discuss how actionable metrics were used in COVID-19 data dashboards to inspire actions of various stakeholders by modeling different outcomes through future projections. In turn, the authors explore how actionable metrics in data dashboards can inform new business and technical communication practices for data visualization.

In this second golden age of data design, digital affordances enable the news media to share occasionally misleading charts about COVID-19. Examining data visualizations about COVID-19 highlights three ways that charts can mislead viewers: (a) by displaying inadequate data, (b) by manipulating scales and visual distance, and (c) by omitting contextual labels needed to fully understand a chart’s message. This article provides takeaways for technical communicators about including and displaying adequate data, representing numbers consistently, and humanizing COVID-19’s effects.

This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892–1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the mechanics of the devices by constructing a series of textual-visual relationships, requiring that the reader scan back and forth between the written text and the accompanying visual. These multimodal texts demonstrate how the students used writing activities to create a narrative of equipment development, which highlighted the centrality of trained vision in enculturating graduate students into disciplinary writing practices in the late 19th century. Through an analysis of the specific interactions and the network of visuals the students used to reconstruct a history of Ether investigation, scholars of writing and rhetoric can see how important inclusion of equipment and its detailed discussion was to graduate writing and disciplinary enculturation in the sciences.

This paper considers the practical and theoretical methodologies of the com- munity literacy project, “The Recipe of Me,” conducted with homeless youth in Orlando, Florida. In this project, youth created personal, mediatized narratives in a storytelling residency aimed at examining the role of digital storytelling in fostering confidence, autonomy, and literacy awareness. The project allowed the youth to create narratives as artists, encouraging not only the creation of a work of art but also the formulation of an artistic voice.

Framed in three guiding claims about relationships between Writing Across the Curriculum and queer theories, this article offers Jasbir Puar’s theory of “queer assemblage” as a model for rearticulating WAC administration.