Multimodal composition is becoming increasingly popular in university classrooms as faculty, students, and institutions come to recognize that old and new technologies have enabled, and even demanded, the use of more than one composing mode for communicating, solving problems, and keeping up with the latest discourse. Professionalizing Multimodal Composition embraces and enacts multimodal composition in various writing courses and programs by exploring institutional, programmatic, and individual faculty initiatives for capacity building and human resource development across institutions. Academic leaders, scholars, and faculty who have successfully designed and launched academic programs or faculty development initiatives discuss the theoretical and logistical questions considered in their design, the outcomes they achieved, and how others can emulate them. This exchange of knowledge, insight, experiences, and lessons learned among community members is critical for enabling or inspiring other programs, departments, and institutions to conceive, design, and launch academic programs or faculty development initiatives for their own faculty. The larger goal of professionalizing is to work with teaching faculty to increase their interactional expertise with multimodal composition, and this collection offers a set of models for how faculty can do that at their own institutions and in their own programs.

This collection explores the role of individual faculty initiatives and institutional faculty development programs in supporting programmatic adoption of multimodal composition across diverse institutional contexts. The volume speaks to the growing interest in multimodal composition in university classrooms as the digital media and technology landscape has evolved to showcase the power and value of employing multiple modes in educational contexts. Drawing on case studies from a range of institutions, the book is divided into four parts, each addressing the needs of different stakeholders, including scholars, instructors, department chairs, curriculum designers, administrators, and program directors: faculty initiatives; curricular design and pedagogies; faculty development programs; and writing across disciplines. Taken together, the 16 chapters make the case for an integrated approach bringing together insights from unique faculty initiatives with institutional faculty development programs in order to effectively execute, support, and expand programmatic adoption of multimodal composition. This book will be of interest to scholars in multimodal composition, rhetoric, communication studies, education technology, media studies, and instructional design, as well as administrators supporting program design and faculty development.

This book on multimodal composition is designed to help teachers of English composition expand the modalities on which they and their students draw, to go beyond the limits of texts that rely primarily on words, and to enjoy exploring the affordances - the special capacities - of video, image and sound. The book offers faculty practical help on creating multimodal assignments and working within digital composing environments. There are sample essays, advice on intellectual property concerns, sample worksheets and forms, explanations of technical terms, and useful advice about hardware, software, and digital recording equipment.

Multimodal Composition gives instructors a starting point for rethinking the kinds of texts they teach and produce. Chapters take up fundamental questions, such as What is multimodal composition, and why should I care about it? How do I bring multimodal composition into the classroom? How do I use multiple modes in my scholarship? With practical discussions about assessing student work and incorporating multiple modes into composition scholarship, this book provides a firm foundation for graduate teaching assistants and established instructors alike.

Multimodal Composing provides strategies for writing center directors and consultants working with writers whose texts are visual, technological, creative, and performative—texts they may be unaccustomed to reading, producing, or tutoring. This book is a focused conversation on how rhetorical, design, and multimodal principles inform consultation strategies, especially when working with genres that are less familiar or traditional. Multimodal Composing explores the relationship between rhetorical choices, design thinking, accessibility, and technological awareness in the writing center. Each chapter deepens consultants’ understanding of multimodal composing by introducing them to important features and practices in a variety of multimodal texts. The chapters’ activities provide consultants with an experience that familiarizes them with design thinking and multimodal projects, and a companion website (www.multimodalwritingcenter.org) offers access to additional resources that are difficult to reproduce in print (and includes updated links to resources and tools). Multimodal projects are becoming the norm across disciplines, and writers expect consultants to have a working knowledge of how to answer their questions. Multimodal Composing introduces consultants to key elements in design, technology, audio, and visual media and explains how these elements relate to the rhetorical and expressive nature of written, visual, and spoken communication. Peer, graduate student, professional tutors and writing center directors will benefit from the activities and strategies presented in this guide. Contributors: Patrick Anderson, Shawn Apostel, Jarrod Barben, Brandy Ball Blake, Sarah Blazer, Brenta Blevins, Russell Carpenter, Florence Davies, Kate Flom Derrick, Lauri Dietz, Clint Gardner, Karen J. Head, Alyse Knorr, Jarret Krone, Sohui Lee, Joe McCormick, Courtnie Morin, Alice Johnston Myatt, Molly Schoen, James C. W. Truman

Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy challenges the longheld notion that the study and practice of composition has historically focused on words alone. Palmeri revisits many of the classic texts of composition theory from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, closely examining how past compositionists responded to “new media.” He reveals that long before the rise of personal computers and the graphic web, compositionists employed analog multimedia technologies in the teaching of composition. Palmeri discovers these early scholars anticipated many of our current interests in composing with visual, audio, and video texts. Using the concept of the remix, Palmeri outlines practical pedagogical suggestions for how writing teachers can build upon this heritage with digital activities, assignments, and curricula that meet the needs of contemporary students. He details a pluralist vision of composition pedagogy that explains the ways that writing teachers can synthesize expressivist, cognitive, and social-epistemic approaches. Palmeri reveals an expansive history of now forgotten multimodal approaches to composing moving images and sounds and demonstrates how current compositionists can productively remix these past pedagogies to address the challenges and possibilities of the contemporary digital era. A strikingly original take on the recent history of composition, Remixing Composition is an important work for the future of writing instruction in a digital age.

Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer explores transfer across various contexts of multimodal composing, extending the early conversations connecting multimodality to writing. Contributors address how writing transfer theories intersect with multimodal composing and present methods for facilitating transfer across modes and media, offering insight into how writers can learn to compose when they encounter familiar modes in new contexts. Over the past two decades the concepts of multimodal composing and writing transfer have grown and reshaped the nature of writing studies, but rarely have the ways in which these areas overlap been studied. This collection shows how this shift in writing studies has been mutually informative, covering a wider range of contexts for multimodality and writing transfer than just in first-year composition courses. It places composition teaching practices and multimodal research in conversation with learning transfer theory to provide an in-depth examination of how they influence one another. Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer develops these intersections to connect multimodal composition and writing practices across a wide array of fields and contexts. Scholars across disciplines, postsecondary writing teachers, writing program administrators, writing center directors, and graduate students will find this collection indispensable.