Multimodal Pedagogical Approaches to Public Writing: Digital Media Advocacy and Mundane Texts

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay

With the proliferation of digital media, the article argues for critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing by examining mundane, everyday texts. It proposes a pedagogy that treats multimodal composition as advocacy, since all texts embed advocacy and students can learn to recognize their own practices and how they construct texts. The discussion links social movements across platforms to the need for multimodal literacy to support more socially justice-minded public writers and rhetors.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages13

Reading Time33 min

AccessFree to download

Multimodal Pedagogical Approaches to Public Writing

What Do We Want From Advocacy?

Defining Advocacy as Rhetorical Public Engagement

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 36, Summer 2017 Multimodal Pedagogical Approaches to Public Writing: Digital Media Advocacy and Mundane Texts Sarah Warren-Riley and Elise Verzosa Hurley Abstract: With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future. In recent years social movements of varying scales have been well documented across digital media platforms, heightening a sustained interest in the potentials and constraints for emerging technologies to facilitate public participation and deliberation within rhetoric and writing studies (McVey and Woods; Parks; Portman-Daley; Ryder; Vie) . From disseminating live news about international political uprisings, to coordinating events in service of national protests, to rallying collective outcries through hashtags, and to visible expressions of solidarity via Facebook profile pictures in the wake of local and global tragedies, it is clear that digital media are redefining notions of public writing, civic engagement, and advocacy in the twenty-first century. And because many digital, social media platforms are multimodal—combining text, image, moving image, and sound—developing multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing is crucial if we are to fully realize kairotic responses to the question Susan Wells asked us to consider two decades ago: What do we want from public writing? That is, what do we want from public writing right now—when, according to recent Pew Research Reports, nearly sixty-two percent of adults in the U.S. receive news from social media (Gottfried and Shearer), when going “online” is a continuous activity that holds constrained potential for civic engagement (Smith), when polarization is a dominant feature of current political discourse (Smith, Rainie, Shneiderman, and Himelboim)? Moreover, what do we want our students to be able to do with public writing right now—when access to communication among college students via mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets are at an all-time high (Smith, Rainie, and Zickuhr), when pressing social issues affecting young adults such as unemployment and the costs of student debt have reached staggering numbers (Fry), when simply logging online requires confronting and negotiating discursive collisions among publics such as \#BlackLivesMatter, \#AllLivesMatter, and \#BlueLivesMatter, just to name one example? Building on research in our field concerning the role of digital media in large-scale and public social movements, we turn in this article to the everyday practices with which our students already engage to illustrate the potentials of critically engaged multimodal approaches in allowing them to recognize the ways in which they advocate and how they do it—whether intentionally or not. Specifically, we suggest that teaching multimodal public writing can enable students to explore the ways in which digital media advocacy is composed and recomposed through mundane texts. Such an approach, we argue, can productively draw from the four pedagogical approaches to public writing Susan Wells identified in her seminal article—viewing the classroom as a public sphere, analyzing public discourse, writing for publics, and working with disciplinary publi

FAQs

Why does the article emphasize mundane, everyday texts in multimodal public writing?

It argues that interrogating everyday texts can engage students with advocacy and reveal how discourse shapes public communication.

How does the article define multimodal composition in relation to advocacy?

It proposes viewing multimodal composition as advocacy because texts embed advocacy and students can learn to recognize their own advocacy practices.

What motivates the focus on advocacy within public writing pedagogy?

Advocacy is treated as a rhetorical activity that constitutes and engages publics through discursive processes, including written and visual modes, supporting civic engagement skills.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay