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Abstract

How can teacher educators utilize infographics to prepare preservice ELA teachers for the complex task of creating both critical consumers and conscious creators of this 21st-century genre? As what counts as “text” expands because of our digital world, teachers are struggling to keep up with the demands of knowing and being able to support students in both their reading and writing of many new genres. Infographics have proliferated on the internet and have now hit print media, so they are a growing reality in our world today. This article lays out what we know about infographics in education today and specifically what we know about preparing teachers to both use and teach infographics in the secondary classroom. It shares an assignment from a writing methods course, where students selected a learning theory to research and then conducted a genres study of infographics before presenting their original research through the creation of their own infographics. The article then details what preservice teachers found most helpful and enlightening about their study and creation of infographics. It introduces several valuable reasons why infographics are a vital genres that ELA teachers and teacher educators ought to be using themselves and assigning in their classrooms to better prepare 21st-century learners for their visual and multimodal digital worlds.

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