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This class is about composition, rhetoric and civic engagement. Throughout the semester, you will compose "texts" using a range of available technologies and media (from alphabetic texts on the page to multimodal compositions on the web, among others). You will write/compose in a variety of genres and for a variety of audiences and purposes. As composition, rhetoric and digital media scholars Cynthia Selfe and Pamela Takayoshi put it, “[i]n an increasingly technological world, students need to be experienced and skilled not only in reading (consuming) texts employing multiple modalities, but also in //composing// in multiple modalities, if they hope to communicate successfully within the digital communication networks that characterize workplaces, schools, civic life, and span traditional cultural, national, and geopolitical borders” (//Multimodal Composition//, 3). This wiki is one tool we will use to publish multimodal compositions.


 * In his book Soul of a Citizen, writer and activist Paul Rogat Loeb maintains that the personal story has the power to "provide the organic connection that binds one person to another" (119), a crucial element in building community. ** Telling our stories and reflecting on our lives, he says, can "help us connect with the stories of others, and with a larger narrative of being" (148). So, in this class, we begin the semester by exploring personal beliefs and telling stories that inform those beliefs in a This I Believe audio essay. ** Click on the page names in the left column to read and listen to each essay. **