Transformative Programs, Transformed Practice: Multiliteracies and the Work of the Composition Program

In 1996, the New London Group made a call to transform the intellectual labor of education: to value texts that combine multiple modes and the multiliteracies that produce those texts. However, we currently have few models of entire composition programs that have revised their curricula to enact a pedagogy of multiliteracies and help students achieve transformed practice. In this article, I offer a model of such a program. I explore the processes by which the program’s curriculum was revised and outline the new curriculum, which now requires that students exhibit three practices: 1) design, which gives students the theoretical knowledge to create multimodal texts; 2) material-rhetorical flexibility, which puts that knowledge into practice; and 3) the circulation of texts intended to effect change beyond the classroom. Scholars have discussed these practices separately, but this program presents a model of all three synthesized in one curriculum.