About the Course
ENGL 4605: Advanced Composition introduces students to advanced research methods in Rhetoric and Writing studies, which draws attention to the constructed nature of discourse and its implications. Our course’s subtheme, Multimodality and Digital Literacy, is our method for understanding how digital and multimodal technologies convey knowledge and ideas in written, visual, and oral formats. Students engage in both theorizing and practicing digital rhetoric and composition with a critical attunement to identity and culture. With attention to methods and methodologies, students research, design, and create multimodal projects throughout the semester.
When introducing research methods, it is important to acknowledge how our unique experiences, identities, and communities influence our research as humans, scholars, and community members. Articulating positionality better accounts for how we might engage with research topics, questions, sites, and participants. Rhetoric and writing scholars have long called for researchers to reflexively consider positionality as a method, pushing back against seemingly “neutral” research practices that fail to consider how privilege, power, and identity impact research approaches (Gonzales). Therefore, our course’s foundation for research methods is grounded in prioritizing reflection, empathy, and respect (Torrez).
In increasingly digitally and visually-oriented environments outside of the classroom, reflexive pedagogy and research frameworks are vital to promoting critical thinking and interpreting challenges in various writing and media. This begins with fostering learning environments that value community, collaboration, and encourage students to explore their positionalities. In ENGL 4605: Advanced Composition, undergraduate students actively explore their personal histories through multimodal image/text making assignments. The following sections are co-authored by students enrolled in ENGL 4605 and their instructor for the fall 2025 semester. We describe our methodological approaches to creating multimodal positionality poems. We identify how various digital composing practices informed our projects and expanded our viewpoints of writing. We reflect on the value of composing multimodal positionality poems as a critical entry point for articulating our identities as writers, creators, and researchers. Finally, we note how transforming poems into multimodal image/texts reconceives understandings of traditional writing and research practices.
Assignment Overview
At the beginning of the semester, students studied the term “positionality” and its importance in multimodal composition. Positionality is broadly defined as “an individual’s critical awareness of their own multiple identities and how this awareness impacts their identity (personal and professional), as well as their interactions with others” (Rodriguez and Navarro-Camacho 3). Following a class period discussion about positionality, students explored their own identities through an activity based on George Ella Lyon and Julie Landsman’s “I Am From” poetry project. This community-engaged project was created during the Covid-19 pandemic as a response to the rise in racist and xenophobic rhetoric and as an outlet for creativity, and hope (Lyon and Landsman). Beginning with the question, “How can we find our voices and make them heard?,” the I am From project has created an archive of textual poems written by diverse voices describing the many histories, places, and memories in which they are “from.”
Our approach to this project was similarly grounded in identifying the importance of articulating our scholarly and personal “voice.” Therefore, we began by drafting textual poems. Students created a list of at least 10-14 moments, memories, items, places, or people that they feel are important to their identity. This could include vignettes from their past, present, or future aspirations, religion, family/friends, pets, items, traditions, experiences, family sayings, nicknames, hiding places, plants, foods, and locations. We found poems to be productive in reflecting on our personal stories. Indeed, scholar and activist Audre Lorde writes about the powerful nature of self-exploration through poetry: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (1). As Lorde posits, poems are often the launching points to sift through knowledge, emotions, and language. Students put this notion into practice and wrote a poem of 10-14 lines from their integral identity list.
Students were then asked to multimodally remix their poems, transforming their work into multimodal compositions. As rhetoric scholar Victor Del Hierro posits, “Multimodality transforms information across media, languages, spaces, and physical locations” (28). Students were asked to consider rhetorical theories, such as audience, purpose, genre, context, and how the presentation of their reflexive research or voice shifts for a public or multimodal audience. In creating multimodal positionality poems, students applied multimodal and rhetorical theories through strategies, such as design, organization, and aesthetics, making informed decisions about how to convey their identities. Students had the option to use their devices, such as computers and software, to design their poems or use craft paper, markers, and crayons provided by the instructor to design via their “digits.” Students created slide decks, PowerPoints, YouTube videos, and one-page image/texts, demonstrating the ways multimodal composition expands composition sites and methods of communication.
Instructor and Student Positionalites
When discussing research methods, it is important to identify our positionalities, clearly describing how methodologies and methods intersect with a researcher’s multiple points of experiences. Many frameworks and approaches to multimodal composition and rhetoric research neglect positionality. However, by multimodally composing from a place of reflection, we put into practice what Jacqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch define as “strategic contemplation” (22). Strategic contemplation calls for researchers to “pay attention to how lived experiences shape our perspectives as researchers and those of our research subjects” (Royster and Kirsch 22). Similarly, Black feminist rhetorician Constance Haywood argues, “the researcher is required to remain in a reflective space where their proximity to the communities that they work with determines the methods they choose to go about their work” (30). We acknowledge that reflection is a powerful step in recognizing positionality in research and composition practices. Therefore, in this section, we introduce ourselves to establish the basis for our multimodal positionality poems.
Student Contributors
Miles Wine is a transgender man majoring in English and Public Writing and Rhetoric with intent to graduate in 2027. He writes both research-based and creative writings, often stemming from his experience as a queer-presenting transman growing up in a rural, southern town. His background inspires his academic interests of “othering” and intra- and inter-communal discourse. He enjoys working as a peer mentor and tutor at the MTSU University Writing Center, where he encourages writers of all kinds to find their voice through various pedagogical practices.
A. Webb is a sapphic woman and senior at MTSU, majoring in English and minoring in Anthropology. Her academic writings and pursuits surround the access to and funding of accommodations and supplemental resources for at-risk populations in order to allow them the same opportunities as more supported communities. Likewise, her creative writings are, she hopes, reflective of the struggling people and communities that raised her, their shortcomings and hearts included.
Wyatt Weaver is a man majoring in English with Creative Writing focus with a Classics minor. He writes both creative and research based projects, and often draws on his other creative talents in the process. Including his professional violin career, escape game designer, and artist. He hopes that through his writing he can improve upon and grow his voice as well as give hope to other upcoming artists to share their passions with others.
Harmon Fussell is a woman majoring in English with a focus on Literature studies with a Public Writing and Rhetoric minor. She’s interested in Information Sciences and Archival Studies, and wants to apply that to her interests in video games.
Eli York is a non-binary person majoring in Public Writing and Rhetoric with a minor in Women and Gender Studies. They center their writing around personal experience and observations, going back and forth between research and creative writing methods. Pulling from personal experience, they find storytelling to be an extremely important aspect of writing and encourage open discourse in all writing spaces.
Instructor: Chandler Mordecai is a white cisgender woman who grew up in rural Alabama. Her personal and professional trajectories have been shaped by her experiences raised by a single parent and as a survivor of domestic violence. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of technofeminism, digital rhetoric, and Healing Justice, focusing on articulating connections among multimodal compositions and rhetorical writing strategies on digital platforms.
Value of Reflective Multimodal Projects
Adapting our poems through multimodal and craft-based approaches allowed us to expand our curiosity regarding meaning-making, digital, and cultural communication. In the following, we constellate responses to the value of reflection, specifically articulating how this project made us feel as writers, researchers, and creators. We put into conversation our composition process and the choices we made to create these multimodal positionality poems.
A. Webb translated her poem into a slide deck entitled “Nothing Town” and incorporated visual, linguistic, and spatial modes of communication. For her, multimodal composition required a careful negotiation of experiences and moments, focused on communicating a “balance” of “good and bad memories:”
It was especially fun to try and pick out images and instances that represented my life in a way that explained how I’ve become the person I am now. There are so many parts of my life, community, and upbringing that have shaped the person I am today. It was hard not to include certain parts because they weren’t as vivid an image, vital to my creation, or didn’t communicate things about the place and how I grew up. Others, like how my sister and I got closer as we grew older, I knew I had to include, even if they were shoe-horned in. I knew I needed to find the right balance of good and bad memories. The memories and instances that were both tragic and happy were especially important because that is how I remember the first part of my raising: full of turmoil and yet somehow still happy. I say “first part” because as I wrote, I realized being raised didn’t end after high school. I was just as much raised by the community I found when I moved to college as much as I was by my hometown.
Similarly, Harmon created a PowerPoint, identifying the difficulty of reflection and noting how context plays an integral role in composition practices:
I found it genuinely fun, but also far more difficult than I expected the composition to be. I had to figure out how to represent my life in drawings and art, art that I could conceivably make in a short time frame. On top of that, figuring out what exactly made me, me, was far more difficult than I thought. It was like picking up a quilt and figuring out what exactly is the most important square in the entire quilt. All of them are important in their own way. But what’s the most important? I don’t know. I just did my best to represent the quilt of my life in as short a time as I could. It required a lot of self-reflection in a way that I found difficult.
Wyatt’s composition, “Wyvern’s Song,” allowed him to practice reflexive multimodal composition, which brought on a sense of accomplishment:
It was extremely invigorating to come up with the parts of my life I wanted to highlight in my poem. At the same time it was challenging to pick only a few of the ideas that came to mind. I eventually decided on talking about the most important parts of my life. That being my family and the things I proudly inherited from them, my violin career that has been ongoing since I was six years old, and my love for creative work, especially escape games and how building them is only as rewarding as seeing the victorious (and sometimes utterly confused) expressions on the faces of the participants. Drawing the images also brought a new life into my work, as the process of putting my imagination onto the page and adding the little personal details in the art like my tiny cat Maui gave me a feeling of accomplishment, that this was something unique to me and was a representation of my story and the people who shaped me into who I am today.
Likewise, Miles created a multimodal video entitled “Rising Son” and noted the sense of empowerment gained from reflexive practices:
I enjoyed oscillating between common threads that have followed me since childhood and those self-constructed divergences that I’ve found on my own. Contrasting and comparing the habits I’ve carried and created over time has shown me what I’ve done with the traits that have stuck with me over the years. Overall, creating the poem left me feeling prideful and nostalgic; I am thankful for the wholesome memories that I can think back to and proud of the memories I have made on my own. In a similar fashion, creating this poem allowed me to embrace both the feminine upbringing I loved and the masculinity I’ve grown into. Even within trans spaces, it can often feel like you are meant to stick to a specific side of the binary and shun the times in which you entertained the other. In the past, dysphoria would hold me back from recognizing the glee I still feel towards my girlhood and remaining feminities, but I’m happy to say that I’ve learned to separate my internal gender identity from the external stereotypes forced on me.
Eli developed a one-page image/text, “Little Yellow ‘Home,’” and described the connective power of reflection and storytelling and how these opportunities expand through multimodality:
I find community and storytelling to be an extremely important aspect of life. I believe sharing stories and personal experiences is one of the easiest and best ways to connect as humans. I used this project to tell my own story through words and images that have deep personal meaning to me. I love being creative and the opportunity to share a story using multiple mediums brought me a lot of fulfillment. I am not from the greatest things, so being in control of the narrative and its image gave me a sense of freedom in expressing my personal experience. At the same time, I make references to people who I love deeply and it reminded me of how grateful I am for the people I love.
Reconceiving Reflection and Writing
This assignment also allowed us to reflect on our relationship with writing. Locating the writing in our lives is the basis for caring more deeply about it. As many students approach writing as drafting words on screens and papers, we used this project as a means to break down our assumptions about composition. Multimodality as a method allowed us to consider meaning-making strategies and what it means to interpret our personal histories. Below, we thread together our responses to how this project challenged traditional understandings of writing and transformed our approaches to multimodal composition.
For A. Webb, incorporating images was at times more productive in communicating her message than written words:
There were a few feelings and emotions around home that I wanted to hit on, but the right descriptions to capture that didn’t always come naturally. As I was writing, I continually thought of more parts of my life that made me who I am, and it was fun to find the right words and images to convey these ideas. Organizing them into something cohesive and not overly verbose was a challenge. I relied on images to communicate what my words lacked, and the words to communicate what the images did not.
Similarly, Wyatt also noted how images helped him convey his message:
While in the brainstorming process for coming up with what I wanted to include in my poem, it became hard to pick only a few things. I have been working on using fewer words to still capture the same story and emotion that I want to convey. This project I think helped that greatly. Having to be specific with my word choice and the aspects of my life that felt like the right fit for what I wanted to say became much easier when I let go of my inner voice and wrote from my soul and what had brought me to this moment. I think also adding the drawings to my writing gave me a little room to sneak in a few more things that were not in the writing portion that are more subtle and not everyone will pick up on those things. It leaves a bit of mystery still in play.
Harmon discussed how multimodal composition required a “breakdown” of traditional writing conventions, such as stanzas in poetry:
I wrote the poem and was very proud of the poem, but I found that when turning it into a slide show, I had to end up playing around with the line spacing. Stanzas disappeared entirely. They were pretty much only good for determining what to put on a slide, but not the positionality of the lines themselves. A slide I was particularly proud of had the stanza in question cover the little representation of me like a blanket. I also had to severely reduce the amount of stanzas in general so that I had time to finish the slideshow to my liking. In a strange way, the opening of different mediums limited what I could do.
For Miles, blending images, text, video, and audio allowed him to reflexively consider how the many identities we have as writers, students, researchers, family members, and more constantly influence him:
When remediating the piece into a photo/video collage, I found myself making simultaneously minute and substantial changes. I believe that finding pictures to go alongside ideas represented in the poem helped me reconsider different focal points and messages to hone in on. I believe I ended up centralizing the concept of duality within myself and the importance of community as it relates to me and my interests. I love putting photos from my childhood beside more recent pictures of myself, as it shows me how much I’ve grown while retaining the freedom and whimsy that I embodied as a child. Similarly, it was fun to consider the importance of other lives within my own. From my parents, who raised me for all the good and bad, to my friends, who represent a myriad of different identities, I see how my love for people has guided and been influenced by my experiences and research.
Finally, Eli found that multimodal composition reinforced themes in stories in imaginative ways:
When writing original prompts for the poem, I knew I wanted to mention my childhood home and the things that stick out the most when remembering it. I do make reference to the house and my recollection of it in the written poem, but I knew that a small reference to a personal recollection would not be enough to fully articulate the image I have of the house. So, I used the house as the dictating image in the background. My poem also mentions how memory can have its faults when trying to recall things from long ago; using colored pencils allowed me to create texture in my visual memory that displays how things can be fuzzy/skewed when looking back on them. This project helped me consider how images back up stories we tell, and how often we use multimodality in everyday practices without realizing.
Ultimately, the examples we present here represent the value of multimodality in composition practices. We used these projects as launching points for various research studies conducted throughout the ENGL 4605 semester. Sharing these projects also demonstrates the many techniques, aesthetics, and designs we used to reflect on our identities, memories, and experiences and communicate them through multimodal positionality poems. Multimodal positionality poems can serve as critical entries for developing reflexive practices that expand and enhance research projects.
Works Cited
Del Hierro, Victor, and Crystal VanKooten. “Introduction.” Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric Centering Positionality in Computers and Writing Scholarship, Volume 2. WAC Clearinghouse, 2022. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2022.1664,Accessed August 25, 2025.
Gonzales, Laura. “Positionality and Collaboration in Community-Engaged Research.” Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing & Service Learning, vol. 23, no. 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.59236/rjv23i2pp1-5. Accessed August 25, 2025.
Haywood, Constance. “Developing a Black Feminist Research Ethic: A Methodological Approach to Research in Digital Spaces.” Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric Centering Positionality in Computers and Writing Scholarship, Volume 2, edited by Victor Del Hierro and Crystal VanKooten, WAC Clearinghouse, 2022. pp. 29–44. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2022.1664.2.10. Accessed August 25, 2025.
Kirsch, Gesa E., and Jacqueline J. Royster. “Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence.” College Composition & Communication, vol.61, no. 4, 2010, pp. 640–672.
Lorde, Audre. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxanne Gay, W. W. Norton and Company, 2020.
Lyon, George Ella, and Julie Landsman. “I am From.” I Am From Project—A River of Voices, 2020, https://iamfromproject.com. Accessed August 25, 2025.
Torrez, J. Estrella. “Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Respect: Storytelling as a Means of University-Community Engagement.” Civic Engagement in Diverse Latinx Communities: Learning from Social Justice Partnerships in Action, edited by Mari Castañeda and Joseph Krupczynski, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2018, pp. 143–58.
Rodriguez, Alberto J., and Marianela Navarro-Camacho. “Claiming Your Own Identity and Positionality: The First Steps toward Establishing Equity and Social Justice in Science Education.” Education Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13070652. Accessed August 26, 2025.
