Dr. Cheryl E. Ball (at Hardware Ranch in Hyrum, UT)

Welcome to my digital (tenure) portfolio. I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University where I teach classes in multimodal composition, digital media, composition theory, and digital publishing. I am also editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

My teaching, research, and service demonstrate an agenda focused on multimodal composition practices in English studies (also called ‘new media studies’ in this context). Multimodal composition can be defined as the production of texts that use several modes of communication (i.e., audio, video, animation, color, interactivity, written text, etc.) often, although not exclusively, using digital technology. I teach students how to compose rhetorically effective multimodal texts, teaching them that a text’s audience, purpose, and context correlate to the media choices they make. In my scholarly editorial work with Kairos, I perform similar pedagogical aims for scholarly purposes, helping authors craft their digital, multimodal work for the best articulation across media and modes of communication possible. The result of this pedagogical and scholarly work is a body of research built on student-produced and peer-reviewed multimodal scholarship. If you have questions about my teaching, research, or service, please email me (cball@ilstu.edu).

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