In Chapter Four, “Making Things Fit in (Any Number) of New Ways,” Jody Shipka opens with the view that writing should not be approached by composition teachers as a “generalizable skill that, once successfully acquired, will serve students equally well irrespective of what they are attempting to accomplish . . .” (p. 83). Earlier, she writes that there are composition courses in which “skill sets . . . are often erroneously treated as static and therefore universally applicable across time and diverse communicative contexts” (p. 83). In her multimodal, process-centered approach to composition, however, the importance of “flexibility, adaptation, variation, and metacommunicative awareness” is underscored (p. 83). In deciding on an image that I feel fits well the spirit of Shipka’s words, I chanced upon this photo of white, uniform chimneys taken by Jan van der Wolf. It represents what she is trying to avoid in her classes.
Shipka spends much of Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011) pointing out the similarities and differences between her approach to composition versus others’ approaches. Shipka proposes that composition students reflect in a rigorous manner on their projects, crafting (per text/task) what she terms, in Chapter Five of her book, statements of goals and choices (or SOGCs). As she points out, these pieces go by various names depending on the instructor: self-evaluations, explanatory paragraphs, process logs, writers’ memos, letters of compositional intention, etc. (The full list and the compositionists connected to the various terms can be found on p. 115.) While Shipka does not consider her students’ SOGCs “the most important texts they produce all semester . . . they do substantially alter students’ production practices” (p. 116). Interestingly, these texts do not require SOGCs be written about them, although this type of infinite regress seems theoretically possible.
Unlike other similar reflections on one’s process as a composer, SOGCs are treated by Shipka as “formal” texts “worth 50 percent of a student’s grade for a task” (p. 116). In other words, she places just as much importance on how students “account for their goals and the rhetorical, technological, and methodological choices they make in service of those goals” as she does on the final, finished product itself (p. 116). Because of the significance of the SOGCs, I, as an educator, found myself wanting to know more about assessment. I agree with Brandy Dieterle when she writes that “[e]ven though Shipka stated how much weight the goal statement had in the assignment grade, it would have been more helpful to me, as a reader, if she had provided concrete strategies for assessing multimodal texts or even the goal statements” (Dieterle, 2015, para. 3). Dieterle goes on to say that “[r]eaders who are newcomers to multimodal composition may similarly be seeking a rubric or other guide for assessment” (Dieterle, 2015, para. 3).
That Shipka sees both the SOGCs and the final product helps to explain her pride in and understanding of her students’ work. But the man who saw only the ballet shoes—but not that particular student’s SOGCs—did not really see everything Shipka saw. Similarly, the woman who did not fully understand/appreciate the student’s board game project (described on p. 140), also did not have access to that student’s SOGCs (nor was she or the man told about these statements, at least from what I read in the book). Shipka’s frustration with these two individuals, therefore, may not be entirely fair.
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