Cultivating Student Voices: Multimodal Composing in the Community College

This chapter argues for the value of multimodal composing as a mechanism to increase student engagement, promote self-expression, and foster belonging and a sense of community in the two-year college classroom. By drawing both on foundational research on multimodal composing as well as a classroom research study, this chapter shows that these kinds of activities that ask students to communicate in forms beyond alphabetic text can be an essential part of an inclusive pedagogy. The classroom research study draws on an assignment sequence from Audrey Fisch (2022) to revise the student introduction assignment in a co-requisite first-year English composition course at an urban two-year college. Through a scaffolded set of activities that encourage students to communicate collaboratively across a range of media, this revised activity gave students an opportunity to make active rhetorical choices and build connections with one another in ways that continued to positively impact the class long after the assignment was completed.