With support from the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication through the 2019/2020 Emergent Researcher Award, my colleague Jialei Jiang and I launched a multi-year study into the ways college writing instructors approach community-engaged projects that combine social justice advocacy with multimodal technologies. Working with educators dedicated to experiential learning and community-building has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this project, as we continually learn from their innovative methods and passionate commitment to their students and communities.
We’re thrilled to announce our latest publication, “Understanding Writing Instructors’ Feelings Toward the Affordances of Multimodal Social Advocacy Projects: Implications for Service-Learning Pedagogies,” which is now available in College Composition and Communication. In this article, we explore how instructors navigate the unique challenges and opportunities that come with integrating multimodal social advocacy into their teaching, and we discuss the implications of these approaches for service-learning pedagogy. For those interested, the article is accessible here: [PDF link].
Looking ahead, we’re excited to share that our project will culminate in an edited collection that highlights the voices and works of the inspiring teachers we’ve had the privilege to learn from. This collection will be part of the ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication, published by Routledge, and is expected to be available next year. We’re deeply grateful for the opportunity to bring these stories and insights to a broader audience and to contribute to the ongoing conversation on multimodal, socially engaged pedagogy.
Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for your support and interest in this work!
Grant-associated publications to date:
- Jiang, J., & Tham, J. (2024). Race, affect, and marginalized communities: Navigating racialized emotions in community-engaged pedagogy. Critical Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2024.2343284
- Jiang, J., & Tham, J. (2023). Rethinking multimodal community-engaged pedagogy through posthumanist theory. Teaching in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2023.2253758
- Tham, J., & Jiang, J. (2022). Examining multimodal community-engaged projects for technical and professional communication: Motivation, design, technology, and impact. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 53(2), 128–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816221115141
Jason Tham, Ph.D. 
Well done! Congratulations and thank you for your leadership in the field!
Thanks for sharing your article, Jason and Jialei. I appreciate your emphasis on the vital work of community engagement while sharing the complexities of multimodal content development. My takeaway is that any community-engaged, multimodal learning worth pursuing is worth pursuing in cross-functional teams. Meeting complexity with collaboration makes sense.
As you point out, not all collaborations result in positive feelings. Another fruitful avenue for research would be the difference that project design makes on feelings. While too much complexity might indeed overwhelm students, complexity alone is not a problem and in fact can enhance student engagement. When projects are designed to make the complexity of the engagement an object of study, however, students can learn how to identify obstacles to productivity instead of only stressing about how to overcome them.
Thanks again,
Joe Moses
University of Minnesota