Jody Shipka is an Associate Professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She received her doctoral degree in English with a specialization in Writing Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation titled “Remediating Rhetoric and Composition: An Activity-Based Multimodal Framework for Composing” was developed under the guide of scholars Paul Prior, Gail Hawisher, Peter Mortensen, and Geoffrey Sirc. Shipka’s book Toward a Composition Made Whole is an extended version of her dissertation. Her research and teaching interests include multimodal discourse, digital rhetorics, play theory, mediated activity theory, and histories of Rhetoric and Composition. Currently, she is working on a new book titled Composing Henryton State Hospital, 1918-2011: A Study of Online and Offline Spaces, which examines how technologies and agencies have influenced the identity of Maryland’s now-abandoned Henryton State Hospital. Epilogue Historically, the New London Group’s, now infamous 1996 essay, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” served to challenge traditional conceptions of literacy, socially and culturally justifying the need for multimodal composing by rooting their argument in issues of citizenship. Revealing multiliteracy practices as culturally and socially situated, the New London Group argued that productive work and effective citizenship requires the implementation of multiple literacy practices in the classroom. This argument serves as a justification for the need to incorporate multimodality into composing practices as a way to account for the multiliteracies of students, an underlining argument essential to Shipka’s exploration of multimodal composing. While the New London Group’s piece argued for scholars to implement opportunities for multiliteracies to enter the classroom, Claire Lauer’s 2009 piece “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and ‘Multimedia’ in the Academic and Public Sphere” reflects on how scholars have taken up multiliteracies – through courses focusing on either “multimodal” making or “multimedia” making. Specifically, Lauer situates Rhetoric and Composition’s preference for the term “multimodal,” highlighting the conceptual design and process through which the piece was created, versus “multimedia,” which tends to value the final product of the piece. Lauer’s definition of “multimodal” aligns with Shipka’s argument that multimodal composing provides opportunities for scholars, teachers and students to understand the process – or wholeness – occurring in composing. For Shipka, multimodal composing compared to traditional forms of composing highlight and make visible the process of composing as well as reflexive learning that occurs through a multimodal composing process. This reflexive learning or as Bump Halbritter[i] suggests “play” of developing writers through focusing on process yields a greater understanding that writing is in flux and should be understood through the actions of writers. Toward a Composition Made Whole echoes the sentiments of Halbritter and details how to “see” those moments of writers at play. For Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole, not only argues for expanding theoretical conceptions of composing to that of the multimodal but provides pragmatic application for how to incorporate the multimodal and assess, or “see”, learning through reflection by composing in a multimodal form. In this way, Shipka provides a balance of theory and application to discussion and working with visuals as a rhetorical tool to better understand, identify and learn from composing as a whole - or process - and not as a final, definitive product. Toward a Composition Made Whole provides multiple layers of accessibility and theoretical usefulness to a range of researchers and teachers in Rhetoric and Composition. Book Review Toward a Composition Made Whole, asks readers to expand narrowly defined understandings of multimodality as a way to push disciplinary commitments focused on written discourse to include not just digital discourse but to critically reimagine, as a whole, the purpose that writing serves. For Shipka then, while multimodal composing is being introduced on a more regular basis in classrooms, Rhetoric and Composition must disrupt the conflation that “digital” equates “multimodal.” Disrupting this assumption demands an understanding that composing processes are situated within sociocultural contexts, paying attention and surfacing how products of writing are shaped from other activities and semiotic systems. In this way, Shipka argues that writing – whether a written discourse, digital production, or x[ii] – is always a multimodal communicative act asking students to rhetorically integrate individual literacy practices to create an end product. The need to rethink Rhetoric and Composition’s approach to composing is derived through an unearthing of tensions in Rhetoric and Composition’s history. Chapter 1 “Rethinking Composition / Rethinking Process,” details the growing disjunction between composition scholars and communications scholars leading up to the 1962 CCCC, which resulted in the creation of a discipline studying the teaching of written discourse and did not include broader influences of communication. This moment in Rhetoric and Composition history is significant to Shipka who ponders how the discipline may have incorporated a more holistic approach to composing practices, in accounting for more “richly nuanced, situated view of literacy” (31), if the alliance between composition and communication were strengthened. This split continues to have implications for Rhetoric and Composition research practices, especially as it relates to process theory research. For Shipka, this split has resulted in a limited understanding of composing process theory in Rhetoric and Composition. Current theoretical frames and methodologies fail to account and examine the multiple communicative practices occurring throughout the composing process. Noting this disjunction leads Shipka to discuss a framework that develops student’s “metacommunicative awareness”[iii] about they ways in which they compose. Chapter 2, “Partners in Action: On Mind, Materiality, and Mediation,” articulates the sociocultural theoretical frame that is carried through the remaining chapters of her book. She uses James Wertsch’s sociocultural mediated action framework[iv] to account for the sociocultural intersections of communicative practices. Wertsch’s framework explores how social and individual practices impact individual’s composing processes during the crafting of products. Further, his framework expands the range of systems and technologies in which individual’s compose by following four specific tenets: 1) a mediated action framework pushes beyond privileged text-dependent concepts of literacy; 2) a mediated action framework primary unit of analysis functions as “individual(s)-acting-with-mediational-means,” which impacts current assumptions made about technology; 3) a mediated action framework examines how bodies, minds and institutions participate in action and how they shape products; 4) a mediated action framework encourages imagination to work towards change (52-53). Shipka notes potential challenges to making visible the uses of technology in this framework.[v] Chapter 4 and 5 return to these concerns and addresses more explicitly how this framework makes more apparent the rhetorical and material flexibility that facilitates a metacommunicative awareness. Chapter 3, “A Framework for Action: Mediating Process Research,” builds upon Wertsch’s framework explained in chapter 2 and applies the mediated action framework to Rhetoric and Composition’s discussion of process. Shipka makes such connections by illustrating two approaches to process research: (1) environment selecting and structuring practices, and, (2) semiotic remediation practices. Discussing the illustrations of these two approaches to process, Shipka makes a distinction between the two. While environment selecting and structuring practices reveal scenes of composing activity generated from the composer’s process narratives, semiotic remediation practice expands discussions of process by looking closer and attending differently to texts than the former process approach. The case study of Muffie, a student who selected to compose using dance as her medium, in chapter 3 provides considerable evidence of how Rhetoric and Composition need to examine different kinds of writing, not just understanding the process to compose an alphabetic text, but the “various kinds of writing that occur around – and surround – writing-as-the-thing” (82). Shipka’s illustration of Muffie supports evidence that writing as a process involves multiple activities that involve other texts, activities, bodies, resources, memories and motives. Given the convincing argument Shipka makes from her explanation of Muffie’s composing process, Chapter 4 “Making Things Fit In (Any Number Of) New Ways” situates her metacommunicative awareness model in relation to other awareness-raising models.[vi] Instead of placing the responsibility in the instructor’s hand, predetermining for students genres, media, and audiences to work from, Shipka’s framework is unique because of “the responsibility it places on students to determine the purposes of their work and how to best achieve them” (87). Articulating how Shipka’s framework shifts traditional pedagogical assumptions, the remainder of chapter 4 provides an explanation of how to incorporate the framework into a course and illustrates how a mediated activity-based framework is enacted in the classroom. Students use to instructors telling them what and how to complete an assignment may find the implementation of Shipka’s framework frustrating, as may instructors who receive assignments that do not resemble ‘traditional’ work, and further instructors may assume that by implementing this framework requires a new pedagogical approach to their classroom. Aware of these hesitations and concerns, Shipka addresses these issues through a discussion of assessment. Through this discussion, Shipka offers up an accessible model to assess student work, seen in chapter 5. Chapter 5, “Negotiating Rhetorical, Technological, and Methodological Difference,” articulates and illustrates the assessment of products that capture the “wholeness” of the composing process. In developing a framework that places greater responsibility for students to describe, evaluate and share the purposes of their work, issues of assessment are inherently addressed – relieving many instructors who are frightened at the prospect of evaluating ‘non-traditional’ work. Through a heuristic titled SOGC[vii] (statement of goals and choices), Shipka models how SOGC functions as a crucial assessment tool for evaluating multimodal[ix] compositions. Students are always asked to respond to a core set of questions. Taken together, these core questions lead students through a series of reflective tasks asking students what they are trying to accomplish, to asking them to reflect on their rhetorical, material, methodological choices, and finally asking them to consider how those choices allowed them to accomplish their original objectives. Image 1 represents the set of core question students must respond to in the SOGC heuristic. Shipka further contends that the SOGC updates, extends and “multimodalizes” metacommunicative potential of texts, most significantly in how it facilitates a reflexivity attuned to facilitate material and rhetorical sensitivity by thinking about how production and collaboration are sociocultural mediated activities (117). While the SOGC serves assessment purposes, theoretically it responds to discussions in critical literacy pedagogy[vii] that continue to rely on the instructor to determine form and technologies for students to work. Shipka is quick to remind readers that in placing greater autonomy in student’s hands, students can reveal new literacy practices that may better responds to these discussions of critical literacy. Choosing to end chapter 5 as a response to critical literacy pedagogy speaks directly to the multiple takeaways and audiences of Toward a Composition Made Whole. Shipka’s book suggests that multimodality is a term no longer rooted in Rhetoric and Composition – but has connections to the field of Communication and k-12 Education. Understanding multimodality then as a composing process argument, opposed to a digital argument, challenges Rhetoric and Composition to consider how a disciplinary tradition focused on - what good writing resembles and how good writing is taught - may not have been the questions needing to be asked. Toward a Composition Made Whole, instead, invites Rhetoric and Composition as well as fields concerned with literacy practices of composing to create a new list of central questions to be explored – questions that upon first consideration may appear strange but through reflexive implementation be made familiar and generative. Toward a Composition Made Whole argues that the values of understanding the rhetorical process of design and the rhetorical communicative work that visuals do inherently sync with composition practices that attempt to understand the process of composing. Shipka’s multimodality argument, enriched by a sociocultural mediated process framework, brings previous divisions between digital composing and written discourse closer together – reminding both camps of the central value they share: process as the integral and vital component of a product. It is hoped that such a reminder will unite and make Rhetoric and Composition – more whole. Reflection Notes
[i] See Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. (2012) [ii] I purposefully use “x” in this piece to represent a new, undiscovered form of writing. Specifically, “x” could reference the dance practice articulated by Shipka in her discussion of Muffie in Chapter 3. [iii] This awareness is highly reflexive and comments on the debated “writing first, consciousness-raising second” concept. [iv] For more information, see: Wertsch, James V. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991. Print.; Wertsch, James V. Mind As Action. , 1998. Internet resource. [v] See Chris Haas’ argument on use of technology in Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy (1996). [vi] See Anis Bawarshi’s Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition (2003); Amy DeVitt’s Writing Genres (2004); See Wendy Bishop’s “Steal this Assignment: The Radical Revision” (2002); See Kathy Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key” (2004). [vii] Shipka models the SOGC at the end of the book on pages 148-149, noting the form that Toward a Composition Made Whole took. That is, while some may be surprised that Shipka selected a book to present her argument, she provides a SOGC explanation of the purpose beyond her product. [viii] By ‘multimodal,’ I am referring beyond just digital – to that of understanding multimodal as a terminology that articulates a composing process. This distinction follows Shipka’s argument that all communicative acts are multimodal as they are mediated through sociocultural means. [ix] See Donna LeCourt’s “Critical Pedagogy in the Computer Classroom: Politicizing the Writing Space” (1998).
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