Chapter 5: Negotiating rhetorical, technological, and methodological difference

In this chapter, Jody Shipka (2011) proposed an approach for assessing texts. This approach differs from methods proposed by other scholars in three main ways: 1) In addtion to assessing the text over all, Shipka's approach considers the various rhetorical actions and activities that went into the development of the text. 2) Another important difference to her approach is that it involved assessing a variety of forms of texts in response to one assignment prompt. 3) Shipka also argued for students developing goal statements where they describe, evaluate, and argue for their own texts.

This video serves as my goal statement for this book review.

The bulk of this chapter focused on the goal statement, which Shipka used to help her assess assignments. The goal statement "detail[s] how, why, and under what conditions they made their rhetorical, technological, and methodological choices...the statements serve an additional purpose in providing me with ways of both navigating and responding to texts that may not look or work like texts with which I am familiar" (p. 113). Although this sounds very similar to traditional reflective writing that students do, Shipka made a point to address how the goal statement extended the traditional reflection. The goal statement anticipated that the texts would not necessarily be print-based and, as a result, students must consider a wide range of choices made; the goal statement was formal in the sense that it was worth 50% of the student's grade; these documents tended to be much longer and more detailed because they were worth just as much as the final product produced; they did not need to be print-based texts, even though they typically were; the questions asked students to think about their texts from a mediated activity perspective. Ultimately, the goal statement aimed to bring to consciousness the dynamic process of communication.

Even though Shipka stated how much weight the goal statement had in the assignment grade, she did not provide concrete strategies for assessing multimodal texts or even the goal statements. It also begs the question of how effective a multimodal work is if the reader cannot interpret the meaning without the assistance of a goal statement. This may pose an issue for readers who are newcomers to multimodal composition and are seeking a rubric or other guide for assessment.