Reflecting on Jody Shipka
As a student, I find myself constantly falling into a rut. This is especially true when it comes to my schoolwork. An essay written here, a homework assignment finished there, it all seems to go the same way. I lay out my materials needed to complete my work, I usually browse social media for a bit, then I work for an hour or two and call it a day. It's not that I don't appreciate my education or refuse to put in any effort besides the minimal amount, it's just that I've been assigned similar projects throughout my years of schooling (and I've been in school since I was 5--now I'm 20). I suppose I'm not the only student that tends to get into this same routine; I'm sure teachers and professors feel this way too. It's a lot easier to assign a student a 5 page essay than it is to assign them a project that requires creative elements.
Jody Shipka, however, refuses to teach her students in a redundant way. Instead of assigning essay after essay, Shipka asks her students to think about things in a different light. After reading her article, "Evaluating Multi-Modial Designs," I have learned what it takes to create a new style of work while encouraging students to get creative. Personally, I enjoy looking at and creating multimodial texts more than I enjoy creating the traditional kind of text. With multimodial texts, the author is encouraged (and sometimes even forced) to think outside of the box that we are so used to creating in.
In creating these kinds of texts, our thoughts are transformed into texts and can be interpreted much differently. For example, the student Shipka mentions in her article created a text that contained 9 index cards, each of the index cards telling a story about the student’s alcoholic parent. In order to obtain these index cards, the wine bottle had to be broken. Shipka mentions that the breaking of the wine bottle can symbolize the violence that sometimes comes along with alcoholism, but the breaking of the wine bottle can also symbolize the breaking of a heart when your parent (or someone you love) suffers from addictive behaviors. I think that overall, the symbolism of a multimodial text makes creating the text much more enjoyable.
Read Shipka's article here
Yes, I LOVE that wine bottle example. But, I think Shipka faces two critiques: one, people try to pretend that multimodal composing doesn't take the same amount of effort as writing an essay and two people wonder how this has the ability to transfer to new composing environments (whether that's a new classroom or a professional space). What are your thoughts on this?
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