Bridging the Multimodal Gap addresses multimodality scholarship and its use in the composition classroom. Despite scholars’ interest in their students’ multiple literacies, multimodal composition is far from the norm in most writing classes. Essays explore how multimodality can be implemented in courses and narrow the gap between those who regularly engage in this instruction and those who are still considering its scholarly and pedagogical value. After an introductory section reviewing the theory literature, chapters present research on implementing multimodal composition in diverse contexts. Contributors address starter subjects like using comics, blogs, or multimodal journals; more ambitious topics such as multimodal assignments in online instruction or digital story telling; and complex issues like assessment, transfer, and rhetorical awareness. Bridging the Multimodal Gap translates theory into practice and will encourage teachers, including WPAs, TAs, and contingent faculty, to experiment with multiple modes of communication in their projects. Contributors: Sara P. Alvarez, Steven Alvarez, Michael Baumann, Joel Bloch, Aaron Block, Jessie C. Borgman, Andrew Bourelle, Tiffany Bourelle, Kara Mae Brown, Jennifer J. Buckner, Angela Clark-Oates, Michelle Day, Susan DeRosa, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Stephen Ferruci, Layne M. P. Gordon, Bruce Horner, Matthew Irwin, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Ashanka Kumari, Laura Sceniak Matravers, Jessica S. B. Newman, Mark Pedretti, Adam Perzynski, Breanne Potter, Caitlin E. Ray, Areti Sakellaris, Khirsten L. Scott, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Jon Udelson, Shane A. Wood, Rick Wysocki, Kathleen Blake Yancey

The book takes differences in multimodality research as a starting point to discuss old and new theoretical, methodological as well as analytical ideas for building bridges between various disciplines and approaches.

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.

Literacy has traditionally been associated with the linguistic and functional ability to read and write. Although literacy, as a fundamental issue in education, has received abundant attention in the last few decades, most publications to date have focused on monolingual classrooms. Language teacher educators have a responsibility to prepare teachers to be culturally responsive and flexible so they can adapt to the range of settings and variety of learners they will encounter in their careers while also bravely questioning the assumptions they are encountering about multilingual literacy development and instruction. The Handbook of Research on Cultivating Literacy in Diverse and Multilingual Classrooms is an essential scholarly publication that explores the multifaceted nature of literacy development across the lifespan in a range of multilingual contexts. Recognizing that literacy instruction in contemporary language classrooms serving diverse student populations must go beyond developing reading and writing abilities, this book sets out to explore a wide range of literacy dimensions. It offers unique perspectives through a critical reflection on issues related to power, ownership, identity, and the social construction of literacy in multilingual societies. As a resource for use in language teacher preparation programs globally, this book will provide a range of theoretical and practical perspectives while creating space for pre- and in-service teachers to grapple with the ideas in light of their respective contexts. The book will also provide valuable insights to instructional designers, curriculum developers, linguists, professionals, academicians, administrators, researchers, and students.

This book offers a new framework for analysing textbook discourse, bridging the gap between contemporary ethnographic approaches and multimodality for a contextually sensitive approach which considers the multiplicity of multimodal resources involved in the production and use of textbooks. The volume makes the case for textbook discourse studies to go beyond studies of textual representation and critically consider the ways in which textbook discourse is situated within wider social practices. Each chapter considers a different social semiotic practice in which textbook and textbook discourse is involved: representation, communication, interaction, learning, and recontextualization. In bringing together this work with contemporary ethnography scholarship, the book offers a comprehensive toolkit for further research on textbook discourse and pushes the field forward into new directions. This innovative book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, multimodality, social semiotics, language and communication, and curriculum studies.

Using Technology to Enhance Special Education, Volume 37 of Advances in Special Education, focuses on how general and special educators can use technology to work with children and youth with disabilities.

Strangely Rhetorical establishes the groundwork for strangeness as a lens under the broader interdisciplinary umbrella of rhetoric and composition and shares a series of rhetorical devices for practically thinking about how compositions are made unique. Jimmy Butts explores how strange, novel, weird, and interesting texts work and offers insight into how and why these forms can be invented, created, and stylized to generate the effective delivery of rhetorical messages in fun, divergent ways. Using a new theoretical framework—that strangeness is inherent within all rhetorical interactions and is potentially useful—Butts demonstrates how rhetoric is always already coming from an Other, offering an ethical context for how defamiliarized texts work with different audiences. Applying examples of seven figures for composing in and across written, aural, visual, electronic, and spatial texts (the WAVES of media), Butts shows how divergence is possible in all sorts of refigured multimodal ways. Strangely Rhetorical rethinks what exactly rhetoric is and does, considering the ways that strange compositions help rhetors connect across a broad range of networks in a world haunted by distance. This is a book about strange rhetoric for makers and creatives, for students and teachers, and for composers of all sorts.