Multimodality
Shipka states “that multimodality is not some specific feature of certain texts, objects, or performances, but a ‘routine dimension of language in use’” (74). This means that we should “treat…communicative practice – whether the end result is a digital text, a print-based essay, an object-as-argument, or a performance – as multimodal accomplishment” (76). She also emphasizes the histories attached to all forms of communication and, with this, she argues that “we need to resist equating multimodality with digitally based or screen-mediated texts” (76). She points to “the messy, multimodal, historied dimensions of all communicative practice. It [is important to not] overlook (or to underestimate the import of) the role other texts, talk, people, perceptions, semiotic resources, motives, activities, institutions, and so on play in the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of those ‘finished’ texts, artifacts, or events” (75).
What we should teach students
In the classroom, we need “to provid[e] students with opportunities to become increasingly cognizant of the ways text and various kinds of technologies (both new and old) provide shape for, and take shape from, the historied environments in which they are produced, circulated, valued and consumed” (76). Additionally, “with materiality added to the mix, student might also be asked to consider what difference it might make to ‘render’ an idea through the production of a webpage, a live in-class performance, a series of memos, a speech, a travel guide, and so on” (79). As we provide these opportunities we are helping our students become rhetorically-sensitive individuals.
How we help students become rhetorically-sensitive individualsp
Shipka offers examples of assignments to help students become rhetorically-sensitive and develop a “metacommunicative/multimodal awareness” (76). In these assignments, she gave students “tasks that function largely as communicative problems to be solved – and that can, in fact, be solved in a variety of ways… -- and that required students to consider how the contexts in which texts participate shape the way those texts are received and responded to” (78). To complete this assignment, students take “responsibility for determining the representational systems that best suit the work they hope to accomplish and, with this, [are asked] to closely attend to and share with others details of their composing practices” (76). Completing the problem-solving tasks, students “spend the semester attending to how language, combined with still other representation systems, mediates communicative practice” (78).