This essay presents perspectives on the range of potential reciprocity in literacy research and service learning, focusing attention on opportunities for individualized and institutional reciprocation, as observed by Takayoshi and Powell. Researchers and students involved in community-based research or service programs have several opportunities to give back to their research participants and service organizations. The more they are aware of these opportunities or can make these entities aware of these benefits and act upon them, the more productive such research and service can be to the field of literacy studies as well as to those who participate.

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