Author: Jacki Fiscus

Panelists Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University Laura Gonzales, Michigan State University Review In “Remixing the Canon: Rhetorical Tools for 21st Century Composition,” Laura Gonzales and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss challenge us to broaden our theoretical understandings of the rhetorical canon. Gonzales and DeVoss began their session drawing from the work of Cindy Selfe, Steve Westbrook, Collin Brooke, and Diana George, reminding us how “the visual” and “the textual” are typically seen as discrete areas of scholarship and pedagogy. Yet, like Gonzales and DeVoss explain, rhet/comp scholars have been remixing/remediating the rhetorical canons in attempts to move past just print practices.…

As compositionists, particularly as instructors interested in digital rhetorics, many of us agree multimodal composition should be present in the classroom. We seek to design assignments that explicitly call students to use a variety of modes. Of course, composition is multimodal—and like Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe argue, language itself is multimodal—but the principle is to expose to students to consider ways in which modes can combine to be rhetorically effective. For me, this is so important because it is likely what they will compose outside of the bubble of a composition classroom. The same goes for translingualism: it allows us to…