The New Composition: The Fusion of Rhetoric and Technological Literacy in First-Year Writing

Awareness of power structures, ideology, and their practices need to form the basis of an integrated, complex system of literacies that I will term social multimodal literacy. This type of literacy is not limited to technology, or the technerelated aspects of various rhetorical processes, or social awareness and engagement, but rather as sufficient mastery of the network of all of these individual literacies combined. The idea of a postsecondary education is built upon the idea of producing, at the very least, a literate citizenry. However, if these fundamental literacies are not addressed by current curricula, postsecondary education is incomplete at best. In short, literacy issues need to find their way into university general curricula. The First Year Composition classroom is an appropriate and necessary place for these concepts to be discussed and explored. The benefits of such a curricular focus are two-fold: first, the inclusion of rhetoric’s disciplinary content as well as multimodal material serves as a solidifying agent in terms of RWS disciplinary identity and second, students develop the necessary abilities to be truly literate in an increasingly multimodal world.