College English - Volume 77, Issue 2, 2014

This essay reimagines the way that listening is taught in the multimodal composition classroom. In contrast to listening to sonic content for meaning, the listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives.

This article draws parallels between the Great Depression and the great recession that began in 2007 in light of the history, methods, themes, and relevance of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) to contemporary community writing projects. Through a critical analysis of the FWP’s legacy as both a twentieth-century American epic and a lesson in powerful, sometimes flawed methodologies, this article suggests that a twenty-first-century reprise of the FWP would unify and inform already existing university-community partnerships to enact the “public turn” called for in composition and other disciplines at a critical juncture in American—and world—history.

Contributors to this symposium reflect on the role of the journal editor, noting the experiences of graduate student editors, the contributions of journal editors, and the tension that may exist between the roles of editor as gatekeeper and editor as facilitator.

Benson examines three books—Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study—that contribute powerfully to the scholarly conversation about the changing face of composition by illustrating how the narrative of newness associated with multimodal and experimental work hides a long saga of negotiation between the traditional and the new in the field of composition.