In his article “What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies?” James Purdy works to connect concepts of design thinking in order to promote solution-based work in Composition. By thinking through design terms, aspects of research and visual rhetoric scholarship move beyond problem-based critique to actively produce solutions. Adding to concerns of design and research, Cynthia Selfe and Pam Takayoshi's work on multimodality and composition contribute to thinking about not only how we shape our work, but what shapes our work for us. Although conversations like this in visual rhetoric highlight concerns of research, there are fewer scholars addressing how design and interface work to and through our course materials within the classroom. We (as visual rhetoricians, researchers, and teachers) are still negotiating what this practice looks like. Jody Shipka's work evokes Selfe in order to discuss how multimodal scholars should “practice what they preach” in the classroom:
showing students that they, too, are willing to learn new ways of composing, to expand their own skills and abilities beyond the alphabetic by practicing with different modalities of expression that may be unfamiliar and difficult but increasingly expected and valuable in different twenty-first-century rhetorical contexts both in and out of the academy (135).
Stuart Selber's Multiliteracies for a Digital Age adds to this conversation of multimodal work in the classroom stating that our expectations of student production should be applied to our own teaching: "they will need an education that is comprehensive and truly relevant to a digital age in which much of the instructional agenda seems to be little more than indoctrination into the value systems of the dominant computer culture" (234). In what ways does design thinking and visual rhetoric become material in our pedagogy? How does design thinking affect the ways we view/deliver/construct our syllabi? What could a 21st century syllabus look like for 21st century designs and literacies? Linda Nilson’s The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course begins to address these concerns in ways that will allow teachers, designers, and visual rhetoricians to make design material parts of their embodied teaching practices.
Nilson’s text works to connect discussions of visual design and curriculum in tangible, materials ways. Higher education and design often seem like siloed area, separate, with impermeable membranes. This text speaks critically about pairing and implementing visual design in ways that are just not discussed in relation to teaching, which is a significant move to be made so that future research can continue to integrate visual design in pedagogy. Just as Steve Westbrook critiqued the composition classroom for valuing analysis of multimodal texts over production and processes of multimodal texts, so too does the conversation around pedagogical materials neglect aspects of visual rhetoric.