We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. 
Rocking Multimodal Composition
Stress. Anxiety. Even a little fear. You might expect those to be my reaction to a Stephen King novel, but no. Those were my feelings about Shipka’s essay.
I like to imagine myself to be free-thinking, open-minded, and the “cool teacher” who embraces new ideas and non-traditional assignments. Shipka’s multi-modal projects and creativeness should mesh with that identity perfectly, right? That’s what I assumed. But when I tried to think about what I would do if given her OED assignment, I couldn’t think of anything half as creative or rhetorically powerful as the examples her freshmen came up with. Freshmen. I’m a fifth year, and I’ve got nothing. I can write a bomb essay. I can make a hilarious powerpoint. But ask me to leave the firm ground of text based mediums behind in favor of a visual platform and suddenly I’m floundering in deep water with no shore in sight. It would be like asking me to translate Pride and Prejudice into Swahili. Just….how?
It’s not that I don’t like Shipka’s ideas because I do like them very much. I agree that teaching students to organize and revise their ideas, make intentional rhetorical choices, and respond to the needs of different audiences through multi-modal projects is way more useful than merely writing essays. Multi-modal composition is a skill that can be used in many different fields of study and work, unlike essays which lose their usefulness outside of academia. Plus, crafting a multi-modal project seems like more fun for students than writing an essay.
Anyways, that was my gut reaction to the ideas in this piece. However, I tried to move past the initial emotional response to see how Shipka’s ideas relate to ones we’ve talked about previously which I found easier to digest. One particular quote from Shipka’s piece intrigued me: “Given the field’s strong tendency to “equate the activity of composing with writing itself,” thereby missing ‘the complex delivery systems through which writing circulates,’ we need to do more than simply expand the media and communicative contexts in which students work.” I see “the media and communicative contexts” that she talks about as being the same or similar to Russell’s activity systems or Wenger’s “communities of practice.” If that is the case, then Shipka seems to be saying we do need a context and purpose for a student’s project beyond merely a grade for a class for a major for a degree. But she suggests that students also need to be able to express their knowledge in more ways than simply a written text. She focuses less on the context of the assignment and more on the logistics and “how” of the assignment, which is a different perspective than any of the other author’s we’ve read have taken. She points out that many methods beyond the essay can allow students to learn the same thought patterns and organizational skills that they are supposed to learn from traditional writing.
I understand Shipka’s ideas on a theoretical level, but I’m not sure how to implement them in my own work, let alone how to create and grade a classroom assignment that was based on them. Shipka says that students should produce “multipart rhetorical events out of anything.” But I feel like students could take advantage of that loose system really easily. For example, what if some student looked up the word “rock” in the OED and then just made a collage of pictures of different versions of the word “rock” such as a game of rock, paper, scissors; a rockstar; rocking a baby, etc. and then glued them all to a physical rock and then said the project’s purpose is to “rock your world.” Would that count? I mean, it’s multi-modal, but it kinda triggers my bullshit radar. I mean, I could totally see a high school student using a multi-modal project as a way to slip through easily, because you can justify just about anything by calling it rhetoric. Could you give the same grade to that rock project as to the genius who made the mirror test project? I just get stressed out thinking about the logistics of how to implement Shipka’s ideas because I’m so used to the essay structure and am more analytical than creative. Maybe the practicality of Shipka’s ideas will become more clear when we discuss it in class.
2 Replies to “Rocking Multimodal Composition”
Hey Catherine,
This is such a great reflection on the ideas from multimodal practices and theories. You are definitely asking the questions of the field. One of the things I’m wondering is can we step back from thinking of composing for school, assignments, and grades altogether, think through the way multimodal texts function outside of school, and then come back to how we would support writers/makers as they imagine work that texts do way beyond school. I also really appreciate your focus on “how” instead of “what”–what if we graded that? The process? Can we set up structures that reward deep thinking though systems thinking and processes? This would hinder the “collage” approach to multimodal assignments perhaps?
I can understand why such multimodal projects for high schoolers can become an easy way to glide through class. After a while it does seem that students just get tired of school in general and will go after the easiest things. At the same time it almost feels that if you gave them guidelines that it would go against the point of that kind of learning. If I had the word rock, I would find a large rock, dress it up like a rock star, in a baby swing (rocker), then place a piece of paper and scissors on the little tray in front, maybe mash songs together that has the word rock in it. I think in this way it could be explained that you would want them to play with the concept of the rock or whatever word they chose and then ask how can you make a piece that makes the viewer think? There wouldn’t be much thinking with a collage of pictures of things representing the word rock