Aaron Kashtan taught three sections of ENGL 1102, the second course in a mandatory first-year writing sequence with a heavy multimodal focus, during his first semester as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech. The specific subject matter for these sections was handwriting…

This report discusses the answer to the question: What might comic studies learn from the slightly older field of composition and rhetoric? The author asks the question as a member of both fields. It is clear that both disciplines struggle for legitimacy within the academy. While comics studies strives for respectability given the popular nature…

The study of comics is an important part of the project of critiquing normative assumptions underlying multimodality and composition. Extending the efforts of the authors of "Multimodality in Motion"--which explains that "multimodality as it is commonly used implies an ableist understanding of the human composer" (Yergeau et…

Thus far, attention to comics in academia has been focused "on" comics as a subject of literary (Chute; Gardner; Hatfield), theoretical (Cohn; Groensteen, "The System of Comics" and "Comics and Narration"; Postema), or pedagogical studies (Bakis; Carter; Jacobs). There has been less emphasis on scholarly composing…

This section of English 177: Literature and Popular Culture, The Graphic Novel was designed to teach students to "make compelling arguments about and in various media" and to produce a "professional-like final product that represents their work to the world at large." While twice weekly lectures by Professor Robin Valenza…

Though multimodality is increasingly incorporated into our pedagogies and scholarship, explorations of collaborative multimodal composition are lacking. Existing literature on collaborative writing focuses predominately on texts either composed in singular modes or by a single author, neglecting the ways in which multimodal texts are composed…

Thus far, pedagogical discussions about comics in the college classroom have focused primarily on "reading," with less attention paid to the complementary potential of "composing" comics. This essay advocates using narrative theory alongside comic studies to provide students and teachers with a flexible, transferable vocabulary…

While comics have received widespread acceptance as a literary genre, instructors and scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have been slower to adopt comics, largely because of a lingering difficulty understanding how the characteristics of the form relate to our work in the classroom. Using as guides the "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

As an advanced rhetoric and composition doctoral student, I taught Engl 3135: Visual Rhetoric, a three-credit upper-level course offered by the Department of English at Georgia State University. Mary E. Hocks originally designed this course in 2000 to, in her words, "introduce visual information design theories and practices for writers [and]…

In Mary Louise Pratt's oft-cited essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," she argues that her son Sam's extracurricular hobby as a baseball card collector taught him about economics, racism, and American history, constituting literate activity that enabled him to hold his own in conversations with adults. Sam was also playing baseball at the time in…