Academia-intelligence agency collaborations are on the rise for a variety of reasons. These can take many forms, one of which is in the classroom, using students to stand in for intelligence analysts. Classrooms, however, are ethically complex spaces, with students considered vulnerable populations, and become even more complex when layering multiple goals, activities, tools, and stakeholders over those traditionally present. This does not necessarily mean one must shy away from academia-intelligence agency partnerships in classrooms, but that these must be conducted carefully and reflexively. This paper hopes to contribute to this conversation by describing one purposeful classroom encounter that occurred between a professor, students, and intelligence practitioners in the fall of 2015 at North Carolina State University: an experiment conducted as part of a graduate-level political science class that involved students working with a prototype analytic technology, a type of participatory sensing/self-tracking device, developed by the National Security Agency. This experiment opened up the following questions that this paper will explore: What social, ethical, and pedagogical considerations arise with the deployment of a prototype intelligence technology in the college classroom, and how can they be addressed? How can academia-intelligence agency collaboration in the classroom be conducted in ways that provide benefits to all parties, while minimizing disruptions and negative consequences? This paper will discuss the experimental findings in the context of ethical perspectives involved in values in design and participatory/self-tracking data practices, and discuss lessons learned for the ethics of future academia-intelligence agency partnerships in the classroom.

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team’s related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how scientists conceptualize and adapt their multimodal writing for specialized scientific audiences as well as lay audiences interested in the work of scientific inquiry. Three concepts—meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—were used to analyze the multimodal strategies that scientists employ when composing for different audiences. Findings suggest that while scientists often restrict their writing practices to meaning compression to maintain the values and conventions of scientific genres, they also sometimes deploy a wider range of multimodal strategies when writing for nonspecialist audiences. These findings underscore the complex rhetorical environments scientists navigate and the need to support emerging scientific writers’ development as versatile writers able to adapt varied multimodal strategies to diverse rhetorical and epistemic goals.

While a strong case has been made for addressing multimodality in composition, the case has been less clear for WAC/WID and CxC programs and research. Studies of disciplinary communication have documented the use of multiple modes in a number of fields, but few engage directly with theories of multimodality or with multimodality in context of changes related to networked, digital media. This study presents a snapshot of multimodal communication practices and assignments across disciplines developed through a survey of faculty at a research-intensive public university. Quantitative results indicate that, with some disciplinary variation, faculty across disciplines use multiple modes of communication in their professional work, their scholarly communication, and their pedagogy. Qualitative analysis of faculty responses complicates this picture with diverse conceptualizations of the relationships between modes. Themes related to faculty experiences of genre change and to the challenges of communicating about multimodality across disciplines are also addressed. These results justify the need for professional development efforts focused on multimodality in the context of WAC/WID and CxC programs and for continued research on multimodality in university contexts, even as they point to the challenges of communicating across disciplines that lack shared vocabulary.

A recurring theme in both the composition and information literacy literature is that writing faculty and librarians need to collaborate more frequently and deeply. Our work is relevant to and should inform each other’s. We need to engage with each other’s’ theories, findings, and values. And we need to work with each other as institutional and pedagogical partners. As the recipient of a Pearson Emerging Pedagogies Research and Travel Grant, I used the 2014 CCCC, the major conference for compositionists, as an artifact for exploring and documenting the state of the conversation between composition and information literacy. While doing the same with a conference for academic and instructional librarians would also be useful for this type of inquiry, first-year composition tends to be the curricular location for teaching research and information literacy in addition to writing, and is therefore a productive site of inquiry. To explore this relationship, then, I identified the sessions most explicitly connected to information literacy and partnership with academic librarians, arriving at a total of eight to attend and summarize here (disclaimer: I presented at one of these eight). What I discovered from this focused view of CCCC is that student research and source use is a significant concern for composition faculty. Many of the sessions I attended were full or close to it. I also started recognizing several faces, who were clearly attuned to the same keywords and themes. Striking up a conversation with one of these attendees, I discovered that she was an instructional librarian visiting CCCC for the first time, an encouraging sign of exchange. Some of the main themes that recurred during the sessions I attended included the notion of research as a process, the importance of engaging students in authentic inquiry, and the question of how certain information technologies may actually shortchange critical thinking. Explore my session summaries to find out more about information literacy at CCCC 2014.