The title and first epigraph of Jody Shipka’s book, Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011), comes from a 2004 article by Kathleen Blake Yancey published in Computers and Composition, “Looking for Sources of Coherence in a Fragmented World: Notes toward a New Assessment Design.” The phrase “a composition made whole” is represented by the word coherence, although Shipka suggests that Yancey’s coherence does not contain as much as it could (or perhaps should). Yancey and Robert Samuels, author of Integrating Hypertextual Subjects: Computers, Composition, and Academic Labor (2007), understandably focus on technology as in computer technology. I write “understandably” because of where Yancey chose to publish her article and the limited scope Samuels assigns himself as shown in the title of his book. Still, Shipka’s point is a compelling one: technology enjoys a larger ambit than this term might evoke these days. She reminds us that in a conventional school classroom one certainly finds technology outside the computer screen’s glow (as a dual enrollment instructor, I know this well): “books, light switches, light bulbs, floor and ceiling tiles, clocks, watches, water bottles, aluminum pop-top cans, eyeglasses, clothing, chalk, pens, paper, handwriting, and so on” (p. 20). Here one might add technology similar and dissimilar to vintage desktop computers: pencil sharpeners mounted to the wall (as well as an electric pencil sharpener on the teacher’s desk), motion-sensitive lighting that makes the classroom dark if you are quietly reading for too long, air conditioning, a printer, a flat screen TV that can connect to students’ school-issued laptop computers, a cellphone in every pocket, the school’s extensive intercom system, and a button next to the door that can alert the nurse’s office in case of health emergencies.
Shipka’s list of non-computer technology items was prompted by Carolyn Handa’s introductory chapter to an anthology called Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook (2004). As with Yancey and Samuels, Handa’s purview could but should not be expected to include technology outside of computer technology. But why does Shipka focus on this kind of technology? Shipka connects technology outside of computer technology with composition outside of traditional, linear, written texts (as in personal essays and research papers). She tells us her “concern is that narrow definitions of technology fail to encourage richly nuanced views of literacy by ignoring the wide variety of technologies—both new and not-so-new—informing the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of texts” (p. 40). Moreover, Shipka is highly interested in the process of composing (and not just the final product). It is in the composer’s process that we discover a potentially rich variety of multimodal elements. She offers as her book’s first example a pair of pink ballet slippers covered in writing. When she was met with skepticism regarding this project (while discussing it in a workshop), she concluded that such doubt may very well be the result of misplaced focus: product versus process. Here I wondered why Shipka does not just embrace the idea of combining art and composition studies—inviting a scholarly dialogue between the two disciplines. The slippers (in the Introduction), the drawings illustrating the composition process (in Chapter Three), and Muffie’s dance (also in Chapter Three) all reminded me of art projects.
In Chapter Two, Shipka explains that she draws upon the mediated action framework of James Wertsch to “provide us with a way of examining final products in relation to the complex processes by which these products are produced, circulated, and consumed” (p. 40) and “with ways of attending to the wide range of representational systems and technologies with which composers work and to examine the role that perceptions, purposes, motives, institutions, as well as other people and activities play in the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of that work” (p. 40). Curiously, Shipka does not mention that Wertsch is an educational psychologist who currently serves as a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. It isn’t that she had to discuss Wertsch’s varied intellectual identity and how it impacts his work, it’s just that the more readers know about an important figure, the more they themselves can explore cross-disciplinary possibilities. (She does, I should note, identify Edwin Hutchins as a cognitive anthropologist on p. 101.) Also, that Wertsch’s work is critical to Shipka’s project but that he himself is not part of the writing/rhetoric/technical communication field is, I think, interesting in and of itself.
As someone with a background in communication studies, I appreciated Shipka’s admiration of communication as a discipline and her advocacy of communication-based approaches to composition. What Shipka describes in Chapter One reminds me of what in secondary education is known as English language arts. As I understand it, the basic idea behind ELA is that communicating well involves improving one’s reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills, all of which go together. When Shipka writes that “[i]t remains tempting . . . to imagine what composition scholars might have accomplished had they worked to forge a tighter alliance with communication scholars—had they not, in other words, made the study and teaching of written discourse the field’s raison d’être” (p. 28), I immediately thought of Maxine Hairston’s 1985 Chair’s address, “Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections,” at the CCCC. Hairston told her audience of fellow English professors, “I think that as rhetoricians and writing teachers we will come of age and become autonomous professionals with a discipline of our own only if we can make a psychological break with the literary critics who today dominate the profession of English studies” (p. 273, in College Composition and Communication, Vol 36, No. 3, Oct., 1985).
Digital WRTC 