During the Fall semester of 2014, a group of us took a graduate seminar on multimodal composing at Michigan State University (taught by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss). In the course, we read, discussed, and built on theories and practices in digital and visual rhetorics. In this blog post, we share one of our course assignments: a multimodal book review project that we hope will inspire further conversation and engagement with the DRC community. One of the tasks we faced in this course was immersing ourselves in past and current conversations around visual rhetoric and multimodal composing by focusing on themes of…
Author: Laura Gonzales
Ezekiel Choffel, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, John Gagnon, Jack Hennes, Shewonda Leger, Rohit Mehta, Cait Ryan, Trevor Sutton, Laura Gonzales, Heather Noel Turner, Phil Bratta, Maria Novotny
Laura Gonzales is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas, El Paso. Her research focuses on highlighting the benefits of linguistic diversity in professional and academic spaces.
Last year, the DRC fellows and I got the opportunity to work with over 20 scholars and students across the country as we put together the DRC’s blog carnival: Beyond a ‘Single Language/Single Modality’ Approach to Writing. Prompted in part by Selfe and Horner’s recent call to put translinguality and transmodality in dialogue, this blog carnival provides a space for the DRC community to discuss, learn from, and value the benefits of blending and layering languages and modes to make meaning. In this post, I’d like to both reflect on the contributions to this blog carnival and to highlight how…
This year, our blog carnival seeks to highlight the affordances of connecting multilingual and multimodal approaches to writing. Our contributors come from a variety of linguistic, cultural, and academic backgrounds, and they are teaching us about the various ways we can continue to expand our conceptions of writing beyond any dominant modality or language. While our blog carnival is still in full swing, and though we have many more contributions coming, we wanted to share a compiled list of contributions that can inspire further conversation. Please check out the list of contributors below, and comment or Tweet @SweetlandDRC to let…
Recently, scholars in rhetoric and composition and digital rhetoric have been paying increased attention to the connections between multilingualism and multimodality. For example, at the 2014 Conference of College Composition and Communication, Min-Zhan Lu, Anis Bawarshi, Nancy Bou Ayash, Juan Guerra, Bruce Horner, and Cynthia Selfe situated the future of writing instruction in translingual, multimodal practices and pedagogies. In this panel, Selfe and Horner highlighted the importance of moving beyond a “single language/single modality” approach to writing instruction, to account for “the increasing, and increasingly undeniable, traffic among peoples and languages” reflected in our classrooms. Scholars have also theorized a code-meshing approach…