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In job advertisements, companies present claims about their organizational identity. My study explores how employers use multimodality in visuals and verbal text to construct organizational identity claims and address potential future employees. Drawing on a multimodal analysis of job advertisements used by German fashion companies between 1968 and 2013, I identify three types of job advertisements and analyze their content and latent meanings. I find three specific relationships between identity claims’ verbal and visual dimensions that also influence viewers’ attraction to, perception of the legitimacy of, and identification with organizations. My study contributes to research on multimodality and on organizational identity claims.

To describe the use of a Composer’s Cut video as a tool for reflecting on and celebrating one’s experience creating multimodal compositions for personal and social audiences.

Two adolescents designed and produced digital video stories about their prior experience composing a webpage and a multimodal literary analysis hypertext in response to the Vietnam war novel, The Things They Carried.

Each student remixed Camtasia screen capture video, class video, and images, enhanced with text overlays and music, to showcase their unique vision as a multimodal designer and to highlight their composing processes. They viewed the Composer’s Cut video as a powerful vehicle for reflection and appreciated that their videos would have a public audience.

Reflection often tends to be oral or written. Digital video supports students in showing, as well as telling their experience through multiple modes. The Composer’s Cut video is one example of how video might be used for reflection that is both personal and social.

Purpose – The purpose is to expand multimodal composition frameworks and practices to include tactile design and use of maker technologies, situated in a larger context of designing for equity and increasing access to picture books for children with visual impairments.

Design – As part of the Build a Better Book project, we designed workshops to engage students in composing tactile books enhanced with sound and Braille for young children with visual impairments. Education undergraduates in a children’s literature class crafted tactile retellings over a 2-session workshop, and high school students in an ELA class designed and fabricated 3D printed tactile books over several weeks.

Findings – Both pre-service candidates and high school students developed awareness of the importance of inclusive, equity-oriented design of picture books, and especially for children with visual impairments. They collaborated in teams, developing design skills manipulating texture, shape, size and spatial arrangement to express their tactile retellings and enhanced meaning with sound. The high school students had more opportunity to build technical and computational thinking through their use of Makey Makey, Scratch, and TinkerCad.

Practical Implications – Multimodal composition and making can be effectively integrated into pre-service candidates’ literacy education, as well as high school English Language Arts, to develop multimodal communication and inclusive design skills and values. Success depends on interdisciplinary expertise (e.g., children’s books, tactile design, making technologies, etc.), and sufficient access to physical and digital materials and tools.

Purpose – To introduce classroom teachers to an integrated digital literacies perspective and provide a range of strategies and tools to support struggling readers in becoming successful digital readers and multimodal composers.Design/methodology/approach – The chapter begins with the rationale for integrating technology to support struggling readers’ achievement, explains universal design for learning principles, and then offers specific strategies, digital tools, and media for reading and composing.Findings – Provides research support for the use of technology to provide students’ access to grade-level text, enhance comprehension, improve writing, and develop multimodal composition skills.Research limitations/implications – The authors do not address all areas of technology and literacy integration. Instead, they focus on key priority areas for using technology to develop struggling readers’ literacy.Practical implications – The chapter provides theoretical and research-based strategies and digital resources for using technology to improve struggling readers’ comprehension and composition that should be helpful to classroom teachers.Originality/value of chapter – Teachers need support in integrating technology and literacy in ways that will make a meaningful difference for their struggling readers’ achievement and engagement.

In this editorial for a double volume on “Multimodality, Meaning, and Institutions” in Research in the Sociology of Organizations, we aim to achieve three objectives: first, we provide a set of guiding ideas about what a multimodal prism entails for the study of meaning and institutions; second, we give an overview of the topics, concepts, and methods covered in this volume and briefly introduce the central contributions and insights of each article; third, we outline a number of open questions and fruitful avenues for a future research agenda at the intersection of organization studies, institutional theory, and multimodality research.

To explore the funds of knowledge that six emergent bilingual students build upon as they produce multimodal texts, how the practices surrounding these events are mediated, and the role of student agency within an ethnographic social semiotics framework. Ethnographic methods were used to document this yearlong study that included videotaping small group interactions, writing field notes, conducting interviews, and collecting multimodal work samples. The researcher served as a participant observer in a third-grade classroom where she met with students two days per week to interact with mulitmodal poetry. The findings reveal the media-rich popular culture and home digital practices students bring with them to school and the ways in which these resources were utilized for designing multimodal poetry. Several essential factors are discussed including funds of knowledge, role of play and creativity, nonlinear writing structures, and agentive design decisions. Multimodal text making requires a revamping of classroom literacy instruction that embraces multiple modes especially noting the importance of images, central role of experiential learning, and space for student choice thus empowering them as learners.

In this article, we develop and advance an understanding of institutions as multimodal accomplishments. We draw on social semiotics and the linguistic concept of metafunctions to establish the visual as a specific mode of meaning construction. In addition, we make semiotic modes conducive to institutional inquiry by introducing the notion of distinct “modal registers” – specialized configurations of linguistic signs within a particular mode that are adapted and applied in the reproduction of institutions or institutional domains. At the core of our article, we operationalize metafunctions to develop methodology for the analysis of visual registers. We illustrate our approach with data from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting in Austria.

This chapter documents a commitment to culturally responsive teaching through the implementation of multimodal text sets in English language arts teacher education. Using a communities of inquiry framework inspired by justice-driven approaches to literacy learning, preservice teachers at New Mexico State University designed curriculum and instruction that considered the importance of students' digital literacies to meaning-making and communication. Through the presentation of a course unit that explores how multimodal text sets inspire literacy learning that is culturally relevant for students whose racial, linguistic, and cultural identities are often absent in mainstream school curricula, this chapter highlights the notion that digital literacies are accessible to and supportive of the minority serving educational institutions of New Mexico. Preservice teachers first considered what topics sparked their curiosity or inspired them to step into learning before exploring topics to which their future students will be drawn to investigate in language arts. Integrating two frameworks for creating text sets, preservice teachers then selected a targeted, canonical text around which to build their sets and supported it with multimodal scaffolding texts. Following the work and reflections of one focal student, this chapter offers unit descriptions, snapshots, and implications of personalized literacy experiences with creating inquiry-based, multimodal text sets in a secondary methods course.

In this chapter, we explore how new technologies, namely, video essays, audio-based feedback, and electronic portfolios, can transform traditional composition curriculum and deepen student learning. We begin by discussing how new technologies connect and enhance learning experiences, especially within writing-intensive courses. For each of the three technologies, we provide a brief literature review, give a local case study, and conclude with suggested applications and related resources.