During a writing pedagogy workshop I hosted several years ago, I was talking with disciplinary faculty members about how and why they incorporate multimodal composition into their courses. One faculty member said, “I used to ask students to make podcasts, but I don’t anymore because I spent too much time teaching them how to make a podcast.” At the time, I tied this comment to the material realities we all face as writing instructors: the time investment it takes to rethink an assignment or sequence of assignments, or maybe the technology being unfamiliar or unavailable. I thought about the fears we have as instructors, that assessment can feel daunting because we don’t feel like experts in a new genre or mode, or maybe so-called “nontraditional” assignments feel like unserious detours from “real” writing. And so, my first instinct in these types of conversations was to defend the podcast, to draw on Jody Shipka when she says that multimodality is a way to foster rhetorical and communicative flexibility. To reach for the comfort of Fawn Canady and Ed Nagelhout when they explain that “it’s never been about the technology,” and “writing is writing, even when it isn’t.” I would approach these types of conversations about multimodality as though the right citation or theory or scholarship would persuade someone to embrace a critical multimodal approach to their disciplinary writing classrooms. Today I realize that this framing is a missed opportunity. 

As writing specialists facilitating these types of professional development spaces, it’s easy to walk away frustrated or confused that our colleagues from across the campus don’t see how urgently we need, as Kathleen Blake Yancey told us more than twenty years ago, a more expansive understanding of composition. Or to see how Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition, which demonstrates that writing has always been multimodal, might deeply reshape the ways we teach it. Writing, as we know, is never neutral; it is shaped by the histories and values of the disciplines that use it. Bazerman tells us that what counts as clear or professional emerges from those histories. Across campus, students encounter lab reports, grant proposals, case studies, program notes, public-facing essays, policy briefs. Those rhetorical situations carry different expectations about voice, credibility, language, and authority. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur remind us that they can also reproduce harm, especially when rigid definitions of “good writing” are treated as neutral rather than historically shaped and power-laden. The way we teach writing, then, can never be neutral. And yet, knowing all this, when faced with a conversation about podcasting, I led with the assignment rather than the deeper question. When I reflect on my approach to these types of moments in faculty development spaces, I see them now as missed opportunities for a real conversation about how we define writing across our campuses and how we instill those attunements into our pedagogies. 

Picking up the conversation about the podcast and reframing it to be about the ways in which disciplinary writing standards don’t just reflect expertise could have led to a deeper conversation about whose voices get authorized and whose get excluded. 

I don’t want to imply that the faculty members I’ve worked with are not interested in these conversations. On the contrary, in every faculty workshop I’ve hosted, I have seen how deeply faculty are thinking about equity, care, and student experience. In another workshop, a disciplinary faculty member told me that “writing is a core thing that we all do. It’s associated with our livelihoods, our potential for economic mobility. So should I teach students how to perform good writing? Even if I know it’s full of biases and historical prejudices? Should I teach them how to perform that so they can participate, even if it should be changed?” This faculty member is an example of how across disciplines, we writing instructors wrestle with how to help students see writing as meaningful but always operating within systems that weren’t built for everyone; consequential but never fully their own. When we meet faculty members there, when we treat multimodality as a lens rather than a product, the conversation can shift to become less about mastering software or teaching specific genres to be about examining norms and how we can create writing spaces across campuses where students don’t have to choose between participating in existing systems and challenging them. Where they can do both.

Yet even when conversations about writing classrooms address power and language, disciplinary colleagues may see the potential of multimodal assignments but still walk away treating multimodal work as something to add to their courses rather than something that asks them to rethink writing itself. Indeed, I’ve noticed that when I facilitate conversations about these ideas, the response often reveals an assumption that multimodal work belongs beside writing, not within it. Framing multimodal work as an add-on can lead us to miss the larger issue: why one form feels foundational and the other feels supplemental. Simply swapping an essay for a podcast does not, as Jody Shipka demands, change dispositions toward composition. The conversation, I think, has to invite faculty to see that sound, image, design, and digital circulation are already part of how knowledge moves in their fields. Not additions to writing, but evidence of what writing has always been. 

In conversations with faculty lately, I’ve been trying to avoid talking about genre or mode until much later in a workshop. Instead, I draw on Krista Ratcliffe’s idea of rhetorical listening to pay attention to not just the tensions that faculty members bring up, but how they work through them. How they reframe their own questions, and how they reconsider their roles as teachers. In practice, this has helped me see that when I start a conversation in which my goal is to persuade a disciplinary faculty member to think differently about a specific mode or genre, it too easily becomes a debate about format, time, and materials instead of a deeper discussion about what writing is, who it serves, and how it functions in a discipline. We must have these conversations with faculty members who may have drastically different definitions of writing than we do. We must ask about what counts as writing in their field. How does knowledge circulate in their discipline? Who gets to decide what knowledge is valued and accepted? And, maybe most importantly to our relationships in our classrooms, what are students learning about writing from the assignments we ask of them? Is it what we want them to learn?

When faculty members resist multimodality, that’s exactly the conversation we need to be having because disciplinary writing standards don’t just reflect expertise, they determine authority and dismissal: whose voices are heard, amplified, or ignored. That is, when we talk with disciplinary faculty about multimodal composition, we must support a conversation that examines how legitimacy and participation are defined in the discipline. For example, in a faculty development program I facilitated as I was completing my dissertation, one faculty member described feeling torn between the creative, exploratory writing she believed in and the traditional analytical essay she felt obligated to assign. By the end of our workshop series, which included discussions with other disciplinary faculty members, she had expanded her traditional assignment to make room for students to engage in public-facing writing, creative work, video, and multimodal projects, not as supplements, but as legitimate sites of analysis and meaning-making. 

Selfe and Selfe title their case for multimodal composition with “convince me,” which is the question we need faculty to be able to answer for themselves. Not “has someone convinced me that multimodality is valuable” but “can I articulate why my classroom serves what I’m actually trying to do in my courses?” That question shapes every part of the workshop agenda that follows. Rather than starting with modes or genres or tools, it asks faculty to begin with their own pedagogical values: What do they want students to learn about writing in their discipline? How is their classroom making room for diverse ways of knowing, seeing, being in their fields? How might a more expansive understanding of composition serve those goals? The hope is that multimodality becomes not an add-on but a natural extension of the thinking they were already doing.

A Multimodal Writing Workshop for Disciplinary Faculty Members Who Incorporate Writing into Their Courses

• Items needed: poster paper, markers, pens, sticky notes
• Time: 2 hours

Warmup (20 min)

Share a physical artifact from your field. What does it represent and why did you bring it?

Key Guiding Questions: How is knowledge produced in your field? How does it circulate both inside and outside of the academy?

Part 1: From Goal → Outcome (30 min)

Educational theorists and instructional designers distinguish between goals and learning outcomes as a way to make a course more specific and targeted.  

Goals are big, broad, and lofty. They are ways of thinking, being, and interacting with the world that you see as important for students. Students may not meet these goals in your course, and they may not meet them for years after leaving university (if ever). You and your course, though, can help place students on a path to understanding them. Goals may or may not be discipline specific, but it may help to think about the ways of thinking that are important for someone in your discipline.

Key Guiding Question: What type(s) of thinking do you want students to develop?

A Learning Outcome is a measurable demonstration of learning. These are tangible, specific, scaffold-able, and assessable. An outcome determines the assignments, tasks, in-class activities, and homework assignments you create for student learning. 

Key Guiding Questions: What must students be able to demonstrate by the end of the course? What specific skills do you want students to develop?

Free write for several minutes before you begin your poster.

Each person takes a large poster paper and divides it into four columns. Title the far-left column, Learning Goals. The next column is Learning Outcomes. Next is Assignments. Finally, the far-right column is Scaffolding.

Write your learning goals for your course in the far-left column.

Then, use Bloom’s Taxonomy or Revised Taxonomy to identify learning outcomes that are embedded in those goals. Write those in the next column and connect them to the goals using arrows or lines. 

In the next column, add your current assignments, using lines and arrows to show how they connect to the outcomes and goals.

Pause here and reflect on your course:

• What types of assignments do you see as being generative for reaching the outcomes? 
• What about students with other ways of knowing? Differences through bodies, minds, and linguistic backgrounds? How do you envision diversity as you think about measurable outcomes?

Part 2: From Outcome → Assignment (30 min)

Spend some time brainstorming about genre and audience. On a blank piece of paper, brainstorm:

• What types of communication do people in your discipline routinely create?
• What audiences do people in your discipline routinely write for or about? 
• Who typically writes about your discipline? What types of communication do people associated with your discipline create?
  • Consider as many forms and audiences as possible. 
  • How does the public access information about content in your discipline?
• What are some common disciplinary forms/genres/conventions that are purposefully designed to be accessible & inclusive for different audiences?
  • Does your current course support students in understanding them?

After this brainstorming activity, look at your poster. Do you see any opportunities for new assignments that better meet your goals for students? 

Add these new ideas to the Assignment column of your poster.

Part 3: Scaffolding Assignments (20 min)

For the final column, consider in-class and low-stakes activities and lesson plans that can support students’ understanding of the assignments and learning outcomes. 

If any ideas fit your course outcomes or goals, add them to your poster. Use arrows to connect to learning goals and outcomes.

Part 4: Gallery Walk (20 min)

Post your poster on the wall. 

Take a few minutes to walk around and look at your colleagues’ work. Leave sticky notes with questions, connections, or ideas you notice. 

What patterns emerge across disciplines? What surprises you?