PROVOCATIONS is a Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) series focused on peer-reviewed, open-access projects that have the same specific gravity as a short monograph, but take the form of experimental genres, fruitful and unusual collaborations, and/or mediated, born-digital formats. PROVOCATIONS projects offer new scholarly perspectives, challenge current understandings of our field, and suggest new approaches to the work we do.

This essay argues for approaches to composing that underscore the translingual and multimodal (or transmodal) character of texts and communicative practices. It maintains that learning about and working with different language varieties, cultural conventions, modes, and communicative technologies (digital as well as analog) helps to highlight processes of making, engaging, remixing, and transforming which, in turn, provide markedly different, and greatly enriched, points of entry for experiencing and appreciating the dynamic, highly distributed, translingual, multimodal, and embodied aspects of all communicative practice.

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

This essay presents a task-based multimodal framework for composing grounded in theories of multiple media and goal formation. By examining the way two students negotiated the complex communicative tasks presented them in class, the essay underscores the benefits associated with asking students to attend to the various motives, activities, tools, and environments that occasion, support, and complicate the production of academic as well as everyday texts.