Rhetorical awareness is the foundational block of teaching composition to first-year writing students. Between reading rhetorically and writing rhetorically, the idea of rhetorical analysis time and time again proves to puzzle our students despite their unconscious everyday engagements with various forms of critical inquiry (Mathison-Fife, 2010). As such, rhetoric and composition scholars search, explore, and test the most effective ways for breaking down to students the seemingly insurmountable task of “getting” the process of rhetorical analysis then using what they have learned in their own written assignments. Likewise, I am one of those first-year writing instructors in constant pursuit of finding the universal cure to the agony with which students feel when newly acquainted with the concept of rhetoric. 

​

Yet with the changing face of the ways we communicate in an increasingly digital world, the field of rhetoric and composition—traditionally focused on the solely linguistic aspects of composition—has likewise begun to shift to reflect the newly emerging needs of our students. The progressively popular idea of multimodal composition has infiltrated the minds of many in first-year writing departments. Multimodal composition moves away from the traditional essay as the only possible way to assess effective writing and allows students to engage with new, equally as valuable, academic genres. As Takayoshi and Selfe (2007) pointed out over a decade ago, however, despite the changes to our students’ everyday communication, many teachers at that time still felt reluctant to incorporate multimodal assignments into their courses. Well over a decade that Takayoshi and Selfe promoted multimodal composition in “Thinking about Multimodality,” as a graduate assistant and instructor in my university’s first-year writing program, I am still expected to teach students essays that our grandparents and even grand-grand-parents were likely asked to compose. 

​

We should probably (and finally) take into account that our grandparents and grand-grand-parents did not spend numerous hours scrolling through social media sites while binge-watching Netflix shows in their spare time. In relation to rhetorical analysis, thus, the needs of our students are constantly in flux as new textual genres pop in and out of style. As instructors, this requires us to show students how they too can critically assess and effectively work with different modes of communication, including the traditional linguistic mode as well as the many other modes that are used to create meaning. Indeed, our daily lives require us to analyze these various modes in tandem with each other as we are constantly bombarded with more than just words on the page when we look up at a billboard or scroll through our Facebook newsfeed. 

​

I would like to propose yet another approach to teaching our students the foundational blocks of rhetoric and one that also has its roots in the crucial need for embedding anti-racist pedagogical practices into our instruction and the crucial need to abandon the colorblind mentality that has stuck in the fabrics of American institutions since the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of moving away from talking about race in the first-year writing classroom, I suggest that we talk about it more openly, especially operating under the assumption that as instructors, we very well may not know what kinds of experiences our students had in high school in regards to the idea of intersectionality and the celebration of difference rather than its shoving under the rug. One of the major reasons why the teaching of multimodality intersects with anti-racist pedagogy is because the emphasis on rationality and the linguistic text has been a source of oppression for many discourse communities. 

 

In order to combine our search for the most effective ways of teaching rhetorical analysis as well as incorporating multimodality and anti-racist pedagogical practices, I would like to propose the use of multimodal books that confront racism, like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), as a potential solution to for all three aforementioned instructional objectives in first-year writing composition.