Shipka argues that “the theories informing our scholarship, research, and teaching must support the examination of communicative practice as a dynamic whole and highlight the emergent, distributed, historical, and technologically mediated dimensions of twenty-first-century composing practices” (39). She also asserts that “granting analytic primacy to mediated action [“the whole of this union or the sum of its parts” (42)] provides us with a way of examining final products in relation to the complex processes by which those products are produced, circulated, and consumed” (40). To do this, she argues for a sociocultural framework: “The four characteristics of mediated action that I will treat below are: (1) mediated action typically serves multiple purposes or goals; (2) mediated action is simultaneously enabled and constrained by meditational means [tools, whether by psychological tools and/or by technical tools such as hammers, nails, computers, poles, keyboards, pencils, and so on” (43)]; (3) mediated action is historically situated; and (4) mediated action is transformed with the interdiction of new meditational means” (44).
Technology
Shipka cautions us against “an overly narrow definition of technology” (20). “What are overlooked here are the technologies that students use in order to create looked here are the technologies that students use in order to create and sustain the conditions for engaging in these activities – turning on lights, arranging themselves at desks, on chairs, on beds, and so on” (10). In other words, we tend to look only at new and digital technologies. “[A] narrow definition of technology fails to encourage richly nuanced, situated views of literacy” (31) and “could limit…the kinds of texts students produce in our courses” (8). Shipka also argues that we need to pay attention to the history of technologies. “Tracing the processes by which texts are produced, circulated, received, responded to, used, misused, and transformed, we are able to examine the complex interplay of the digital and analog, of the human and nonhuman, and of technologies, both new and not so new” (30).
Multimodality
One of her central points is that all communicative practice is multimodal (13). “A composition made whole recognizes that whether or not a particular classroom or group of students are wired, students may still be afforded opportunities to consider how they are continually positioned in ways that require them to read, respond to, align with – in short, to negotiate – a streaming interplay of words, images, scents, and movements. Classroom experiences certainly demand this of them, but so does driving, crossing the street, or running to the grocery store” (21)
Shipka “suggest[s] that what matters is not simply that students learn to produce specific kinds of texts – whether linear, print-based, digital, object- and performance-based texts, or some combination thereof. Rather, what is crucial is that students leave their courses exhibiting a more nuanced awareness of the various choices they make, or even fail to make, throughout the processes of producing a text and to carefully consider the effect those choices might have on others” (84-5). “A mediated activity-based multimodal framework for composing provides an alternative to pedagogical approaches that facilitates flexibility and metacommuncative awareness without predetermining for students the specific genres, media, and audiences with which they will work” (87). She “suggest[s] that students who are provided with tasks that do not specify what their final products must be and that ask them to imagine alternative contexts for their work come away from the course with a more expansive, richer repertoire of making-making and problem-solving strategies” (101).
Pedagogy
Shipka argues that her suggested pedagogy does not denigrate or ignore writing; instead, "attending to writing [is], indeed a crucial part of - but not the whole of - what it means to compose [and] is a necessary first step in working toward the realization of a composition made whole" (131). She also contends, "Creating courses that provide students with a greater awareness of, and ability to reflect on, the ways in which writing intersects and interacts with other semiotic systems does not necessarily make for more work. It makes for different work, perhaps, but work that I believe we should have been doing all along" (137). This pedagogy should not be one in which teachers attempt to teach one semiotic system for a period of time and then move to the next. Rather, "treating writing in relation to other kinds of modalities means that the purposes and potentials of alphabetic text can be attended to throughout the course of the semester" (137). This also means that "instructors who may not consider themselves experts is [other] modes can still focus primarily on the role that written text plays. The important difference has to do with refusing to ignore the presence or impact of these modes, and asking students to consider how other semiotic systems alter, complicate, expand, enrich, and/or share one's reception of the written text" (138).
TL;DR: The goal of composition: is “to teach students effective, rhetorically based strategies for taking advantage of all available means of communicating effectively and productively, to multiple audiences, for different purposes, and using a range of genres” (108).
Key terms
- Text: “any ‘coherent constellation of signs that constitute a structure of meaning for some audience’” (40).