My overall goal for First Year Composition is to use authentic visual-based genres to help all students become flexible 21st century composers. Using infographics and other visual expressions of data and ideas to explain course concepts, analyze class and student data, and to help students create is one way to do just that.

21st century composition is impacted by two emerging realities: Increasingly multilingual classrooms and a visual/design oriented culture. In order to fully participate in the discourses that matter, students must be able to read and manipulate visual elements. With our students, we must practice visual composing to be “active participants in social change, as learners and students who can be active designers -- makers -- of social futures” (New London Group 1996, 64).

The number of international students enrolled in US institutions of higher education continues to increase. But this only represents one group of multilingual writers in our classroom. We must adapt our pedagogy to recognize this new multilingual reality.

ALL of our students will be composing in a global world, across cultures and language. Visual design can be the new lingua franca.

I use this slide on the first day of class to introduce students to the kind of visual thinking and composing we’ll be doing over the semester. By asking rhetorical questions about its purpose, audience, context, and effectiveness, we begin a conversation about using visual design to connect data and ideas -- and we have a discussion about the role mobile devices play in the classroom!

By showing data visually, infographics can help us re-see relationships and answer questions in new ways. This infographic by VCARS poses a question -- Is Elon Musk the real life Tony Stark? -- and then visually compares the two. The full infographic can be seen at http://www.vcars.co.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/Is-Elon-Musk-the-real-Ironma....

Key principles of genre instruction for multilingual writers include understanding that writing is a social activity, with a purpose, context, and intended audience; learning to write is needs-oriented, incorporating the kinds of writing students will be doing in other contexts outside of class; and learning to write requires explicit outcomes and expectations, outlining why the genre is being studied and how it will be evaluated (Hyland, 2007). The infographic, with its long history in multiple disciplines, is a useful multimodal format to use with genre-focused pedagogy, especially given that most international students are likely to be STEM + Business Majors.

McCandless argues that formal training in design is not necessary to create visual representations of data. Through constant exposure we have acquired fluency in design. To become powerful users -- readers and creators of design -- we must cultivate critical awareness of how design works in our lives. Composition instructors untrained in design can learn alongside students.

Stuart Selber (2004) argues for teachers to help students develop functional, critical, and rhetorical digital literacy. As 21st century literacy educators, we should help our student use image in concert with text. Anne Wysocki (2004) writes we can help students toward awareness “of the range materialities of texts and...then [how to] highlight the materiality” (15). With infographics and visual expression of ideas we can literally open up “new possibilities for seeing selves that are connected within and to new structures” (16).

I asked students to do a rhetorical analysis of this newsletter for parents with young children to understand how the meaning of the text -- advice on encouraging pre-literacy family practice -- comes from more than just the words on the page. This rhetorical analysis of ALL modes of the text preceeded an assignment where multilingual students identified and translated relevant parts of the text into their native languages as part of a community Service Learning project.

We continued to ask questions about the visual impact on the text when English changes to another language, like Arabic. What does this translation say that the first text doesn’t? How can Arabic be incorporated into the original design to keep continuity? What expectations might readers have of a text that looks like this?

This infographic illustrates the intersection at which a good research question is formed. I use this on my syllabus for cross cultural sections of First Year Research Writing. This models for students how to start thinking visually about relationships. I require them to use venn diagrams as they are selecting research topics.

Changing the look of a text by running it through a Word Cloud generator opens up new meanings. Students in my classes turn in all of their homework in a single Google Doc. At the end of the semester, we made word clouds out of their Google Docs. This highlights themes of the class in a different way than simply reading through the entire document. We discussed the difference between the two in look, meaning, and purpose.

Putting data gathered from class evaluation into an infographic can help students see course concepts in a new way. I first had students write a reflective paragraph about how they would rate the organization and evidence of opinion pieces. We used images from the Internet to stand in for levels of persuasiveness. Students read peer paper and then placed a dot on the continuum of where the paper measured in these two areas. This helped us see a trend in the class and served as a comparison point for how students felt about their own papers.

In my research writing class, I had students create their own data. There are an increasing number of relatively easy to use infographic-generating tools on the web. Students can explore and present on them in groups before choosing one to use. This infographic was created in PowerPoint.

These are web sites that have informed my own thinking about inforgraphics (and, you’ll note, this presentation was created on an iPad using HaikuDeck).