Historicizing
Alongside these arguments, the authors push for a more historical understanding of multimodality. “[O]ur move to historize is to invite a more robust consideration of the multiple contexts – including the sociocultural, political, pedagogical, and affective – that inform, structure, and condition how we compose with new media. Such composing, we believe, is always ‘interested,’ invested in forwarding values and ideologies, consciously or not” (21). Rhodes and Alexander emphasize that “the Web does not constitute a neutral space, and…people who compose for the Web, who use new and multimedia, work in specific sociocultural contexts, bounded by intricacies of location, access, ability, and ideology. Since those contexts change over time, any understanding of literate practice must acknowledge those change, tracking their histories and developments to achieve a richer sense of the horizons – and limits – of literate practice and possibility” (34-5). Part of this history has to do with how people adhere to and/or play with genre conventions. “Genres mix and remix over times…to create new possibilities for meaning and interpretation, but they also play with their own tropes… to signal and produce new interpretive possibilities” (96). Additionally, Rhodes and Alexander assert, “[T]racing those histories of media show us how our own interaction with and creation of media shifts, changes, and alters. New media offer us potentially whole new ways to experience the world. These new ways to not invalidate older ways of knowing” (59-60)
Teaching
If we take the authors’ arguments to heart, our teaching will be affected in several ways. Importantly, Rhodes and Alexander argue, multimodal composition “is not simply an extension of traditional composition, and we can’t simply overlay traditional frameworks onto composing with multiple modes” (3-4). There is a “need to prioritize explorations of the kinds of literacy practices that students are developing, as opposed to front-loading our composition curricula with our particular course and institutional aims, goals, and desires” (63). (In this discussion, Rhodes and Alexander warn against “‘techno-inclusionism,’ or the drive to include new information and communication technologies in the composing process and in our curricula” (46).) This is important because “[h]ow we present multimedia and composing with multimedia will influence students’ reception and production of multimedia” (20)
Both what we start with (student literacies vs. institutional goals) and the content we teach will be affected. First, “our approach to writing instruction may shift substantially from ‘introducing’ students to varieties of literate and rhetorical practice to exploring with them the kinds of emerging literate practices that may be personally, professionally, and critically useful” (129). Considering how literacy moves from space to space is called transliterate awareness (the authors define transliteracies as “portable literacies”) (143). We also have the opportunity to think more about collaboration and experimentation in composing. “[M]ultimodality can be understood not just in terms of the materials that people use to compose, but also in terms of the increasingly collaborative and interactive ways in which composers engage media spaces as sites of literacy development, play, and experimentation” (127). We will also need to focus on emotion in composing and composing practices as we analyze how new media affect our subjectivities (192). Lastly, we can concentrate on the importance of circulation and distribution: “emphasizing multiple modalities of compositional production should create robust contexts for metacognitive thinking about how text are made, produced, disseminated, and circulated, as well as how they are picked up, remixed and redistributed” (167).
Finally, pedagogical practice will need to change, both in (i.e. assessment) and out (i.e. a teacher’s individual composing) of the classroom. The authors write, “effective assessment of multimodal compositions cannot rely on older forms and genres; rather, ‘the rules of the assessment game must change to emphasize rhetorical and linguistic improvisation and innovation as opposed to predetermined, set criteria’…and ‘assessments need to keep pace with new technologies rather than trying to affix criteria of print literacies on digital texts and composing processes that are emerging with new media composition’” (52-3). Also, students should not be the only ones exploring and creating new media texts; teachers should as well (109). “[T]eachers themselves must compose visually, must question their own literacies, must critique and design multimodally if they are to teach future students well” (118).