CFP–Special Issue on “Multimodality”

Special Issue on Multimodality
Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies

Fall 2015

Click this link for Archive of the Special Issue

Call for Papers

Guest Editors:

Santosh Khadka, PhD, California State University, Northridge,

Jennifer C. Lee, PhD, California State University, Northridge.

In her 2004 Conference of College Composition and Communication Chair’s address, Kathleen Blake Yancey called for the redefinition of composition in the context of new media and digital technologies. Such a reconceived notion of composition, she argued, would include print, but also multimodal writing done with multisemiotic resources, such as sound, video, images, graphics, and animation. Interestingly, the current definition of literacy for the 21st century by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) speaks to the positions of many scholars like Yancey, as it underscores proficiency with the tools of technology, collaborative and cross-cultural problem-solving, design and sharing of information for global communities, analysis and synthesis of multiple streams of information, creation and evaluation of multimodal texts, and attending to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments (The NCTE Position Statement).

This conversation around conceptual shifts in the notion of literacy from primarily print-based to hybrid, multimodal/multimedia, and plurisemiotic meaning-making practices challenges the ways we teach our students to write. Digital multimodality, in particular, has already engaged the imaginations of many enthusiastic teachers and scholars, and it still merits more academic exploration. This special issue, therefore, invites scholarly articles that explore “multimodality” in relation to composing or other multiliteracy practices, from theoretical, practical, or conceptual approaches. In addition, this issue welcomes experiential articles as well, and will feature sample assignments, student projects, and accounts of successful multimodal instruction in a separate section on Teaching Artifacts (see details below).

Articles may address one or more of the following:

  • Complicating the Notion of Multimodality: The concept of multimodality has been widely contested over the years, and contributors are invited to enter this conversation. Are the current definitions of multimodality adequate to capture the range of activities people do with multimedia? Do they clarify students’ expectations and execution or create ambiguity? How can we revisit and re-imagine the definitions and frameworks of multimodality and its instruction?
  • Challenges to Multimodality: Multimodality often faces and presents a variety of challenges and barriers. What are some of the theoretical, infrastructural and/or administrative barriers to multimodal writing/literacy instruction? How can instructors negotiate such barriers?
  • Social Media and Multimodal Collaborations: Social media (facebook, twitter, etc.) and collaborative, interactive sites (youtube, google drive, wikipedia, ) provide ample space for users to create multimodal texts, share them, and interact with local and global communities. How do socioeconomic variables, such as age, sex, class, access, and abilities etc., influence multimodal composition choices in these multimodal spaces, and vice versa? What effect does collaboration have on multimodal creation, and how does this differ from sole-authored creations? What pedagogical approaches and best practices can instructors apply when using such collaborative, interactive web 2.0, and cloud technologies/sites in the classroom?
  • Diverse Contexts of Multimodality: Multimodal texts often reach an international audience through their internet availability. What are the sociocltural implications of globalized communication through such texts? How can instructors prepare students to communicate across cultures? How can multimodal composition facilitate language instruction and strengthen fluency in multiple languages in diverse writing classrooms? How can multimodality be engaged productively in a classroom characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity?
  • Multimodal Training: As a relatively new addition to the writing classroom, multimodal composition is sometimes alien and alienating to instructors who are new to this practice. How can teachers develop the skills that they need to teach multimodal composing effectively? What individual, departmental, and institutional initiatives can facilitate this learning process?
  • Multimodal Experiments: Multimodality presents many opportunities for experimentation. In what ways can instructors experiment with new platforms of multimodal composing? What opportunities present themselves amid multimodal projects? What successes and stumbles have instructors experienced, and what are the takeaways?
  • Multimodality in First Year Writing: First-year writing instruction has increasingly integrated multimodal assignments. Under what circumstances are such assignments most effective? What pedagogical influences and practices most facilitate multimodal composition/instruction? In particular, how can first-year writing instructors negotiate curricular, administrative or infrastructural limitations or constraints to multimodal instruction?

Teaching Artifacts: In addition to full length articles, this special issue will feature a section on Teaching Artifacts. We invite submissions of teaching artifacts, such as assignment sheets, student projects, syllabi, etc. Artifacts should be accompanied by brief instructor commentary (approximately 250 words) of the assignment’s gains and/or challenges.

Timeline for Articles:

  • Proposals due (175 words): February 24, 2015
  • Proposal review complete; papers invited by request: February 26, 2015
  • Submission of completed manuscript: April 06, 2015
  • Double-blind review period: April 06 – May 11, 2015
  • Notification to authors of manuscript acceptance/rejection/revise and resubmit: May 12, 2015
  • Submission of papers with all author revisions complete: June 13, 2015
  • Publication of special issue: July 31, 2015

Timeline for Teaching Artifacts Submission:

  • Submission of Teaching Artifacts: March 23, 2015
  • Editor review period: March 23 – June 13, 2015
  • Notification to authors of Teaching Artifacts acceptance/rejection/revision: June 14, 2015
  • Submission of Teaching Artifacts with all revisions complete: July 12, 2015
  • Publication of special issue: July 31, 2015

Please refer to JOGLTEP author guidelines, included below

Queries, proposals, Teaching Artifacts, and papers for consideration should be emailed to both Santosh Khadka and JC Lee at santosh.khadka@csun.edu and jennifer.c.lee@csun.edu

Preparation

  • Paper should address the field of global literacies, technologies (Web 2.0, social media, new media, mobile apps and pedagogy, cloud computing, etc.), and emerging pedagogies.
  • JOGLTEP welcomes a variety of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical/research-based papers.
  • Author(s) should either follow American English (AE) or British English (BE), or they should be consistent.
  • Writings should be clear, concise, and consistent.
  • The submission must be original; it neither has been previously published, nor has been considered for publication nor under review in other journals or elsewhere.

Presentation

  • Article length is not an issue, however, preferably within 6,000 words.
  • Article title should not exceed 25 words.
  • Article title page with author details (email ID, short bio, and institution) must be in a separate page; author’s name/s must be removed from the manuscript; if an author is cited, “author” and year should be used.
  • Article should include an abstract up to 175 words.
  • Articles should include keywords not exceeding 5 words.
  • Article classification should be indicated (e.g. research/empirical, methodological, theoretical, position paper, and interviews, etc.).
  • Appropriate headings and subheadings are required.
  • Article must follow the most current APA (6th edition) style guide.
  • Figures, tables, images, and multimedia files
    • Figures and tables should be placed within the texts with captions.
    • Images should be sent in separate files using JPEG, Ping, or TIFF formats.
    • Multimedia files should be sent in separate files using flash or mp3 formats; multimedia materials (e.g. videos) should be between 3-5 minutes in length.
  • References should be in the current APA (6th edition) style format.

Review process

  • First a desk/home review will be conducted by editors. Next, each paper will be sent for a blind review, at least to be reviewed by three different reviewers. Reviewers’ recommendations will indicate whether paper is rejected, accepted or to be revised for publication.

Post-acceptance/publication (final submission)

  • For the accepted papers, author(s) should complete final proofs and edits.

Some Sources on “Multimodality” Contributors might Find Relevant

Ball, Cheryl, and Byron Hawk. “Special Issue: Sound in/as Compositional Space: A Next Step

in Multiliteracies.” Computers and Composition 23.3 (2006): 263–65.

Baron, Dennis. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford: Oxford

UP, 2009.

Beach, Richard, Chris M. Anson, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, Thomas Reynolds. Understanding

and Creating Digital Texts: An Activity-Based Approach. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman

& Littlefield, 2014.

Brooke, Collin G. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media (New Dimensions in

Computers and Composition). Chesskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009.

DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Infrastructure and

Composing: The When of New-Media Writing.” College Composition and

Communication, 57.1 (2005): 14-44.

Kennedy, Krista. “Textual Machinery: Authorial Agency and Bot-Written Texts in Wikipedia.”

The Responsibilities of Rhetoric: Proceedings of the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America

Conference. Eds. Michelle Smith & Barbara Warnick. Waveland Press, 2009.

Maranto, Gina and Matt Barton. “Paradox and Promise: MySpace, Facebook, and the

Sociopolitics of Social Networking in the Writing Classroom.” Computers and

           Composition, 27 (2010): 36–47.

McKee, Heidi. “Sound Matters: Notes Towards the Analysis and Design of Sound in

Multimodal Web Texts.” Computers and Composition 23.3 (2006): 335-54.

National Writing Project, DeVoss, Danielle Nicole, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks.

Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2010

Palfrey, John, and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital

Natives. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Porter, James E. “Recovering delivery for digital rhetoric.” Computers and Composition

26.4 (2009): 207-224.

Rife, Martine Courant. Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University Press, 2013.

Rosinski, Paula and Megan Squire. “Strange Bedfellows: Human-Computer Interaction,

Interface Design, and Composition Pedagogy.” Computers and Composition, 26

(2009): 149–163.

Schmidt, Christopher. “The New Media Writer as Cartographer.” Computer and

Composition 28.4 (2011): 303–314.

Selfe, Cynthia L. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal

Composing.” CCC 60.4 (2009): 616-663.

Shipka, Jody. “Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness.” Computer and

Composition 23 (2006) 355–373.

Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: The

Penguin Press, 2010.

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. London:

Allen Lane, 2008.

Sorapure, Madeleine. “Information Visualization, Web 2.0, and the Teaching of

Writing.” Computers and Composition, 27 (2010): 59–70.

Takayoshi, Pamela, and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Thinking about Multimodality.” Multimodal

Composition: Resources for Teachers. Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P,

  1. 1–12.

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes

Everything. New York: Portfolio, 2008.

Turner, Kristen Hawley, and Troy Hicks. “That’s not writing: Exploring the intersection of

digital writing, community literacy, and social justice.” Community Literacy Journal 06.1

(2011): 55-78.

Vie, Stephanie. “Digital Divide 2.0: “Generation M” and Online Social Networking Sites

in the Composition Classroom.” Computers and Composition, 25 (2008): 9–23.

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts

incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media.” In What Writing Does and How It Does

It: An Introduction to Analysis of Text and Textual Practices. Edited by Charles Bazerman

and Paul Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2003: 123-163.

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