Transmodality In/and Processes of Making: Changing Dispositions and Practice
Focusing on two ends of the school based learning/literacy spectrum elementary school and college, respectively Gunther Kress and Geoffrey Sirc underscore something of the power, pervasiveness, and single mindedness of what Bruce Horner, Tim Lockridge, and Cynthia Selfe (forthcoming) refer to as "SLMN" (a standard language and modal norm) an orientation to, or expectation for, a single, seemingly stable, uniform "norm" for language uptake and production which, as Selfe maintains, has led to the "fetishizing of alphabetic/print texts as the modality of reason" (15) Put simply, and to paraphrase Kress and Sirc, while other representational/experiential/linguistic/material options exist, formal schooling practices often suggest that one cannot know, or it follows, be known, except through the abstractions of certain varieties of written language.In tracing the emergence of the terms multimodality and translinguality, Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe suggest both are a response to events "on the ground," namely,the development and increasingly global reach and use of new communication technologies and networks for these; the increasing, and increasingly undeniable, traffic among people and languages; and the consequent recognition by teacherscholars [sic] of composition that the assumption of a monolingual and monomodal norm for composition as communicative practice and terrain of study is no longer appropriate, if indeed it ever was. (my emphasis)Like others featured here, I treat difference not as a problem to be solved or corrected, but as a resource for making and negotiating meaning. Following Horner et al. I underscore the importance of "honoring the power of all language users to shape language to specific ends; recognizing the linguistic heterogeneity of all users of language both within the United States and globally; and directly confronting English monolingualist expectations by researching and teaching how writers can work with and against, not simply within, those expectations" (305) Yet in keeping with Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe, I insist upon the importance of approaches to composing that bring the translingual and multimodal (or transmodal) character of texts and communicative practices "to the fore of consciousness" (12) that recognize "the degree to which existing and past practices are at odds with the ideology of SLMN," and that attempt to "recuperate the full array" of communicative options "occluded by dispositions advanced by that ideology" (27) Finally, like Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe, I contend that it is not enough to simply work toward changing dispositions to "grasp how specific practices are multimodal despite the blindness to that multimodal character that dominant culture's training has led us to" (7) or "to recognize or acknowledge the legitimacy of the transmodal position" (8) Rather, as others in this issue argue (Bawarshi, Canagararjah, Cushman, Guerra) we need also to commit fully to altering our pedagogical and research practices to consider how concretely engaging with different modes, genres, materials, cultural practices, communicative technologies, and language varieties impacts our abilities to make and negotiate meaning, how it impacts both what and how we come to know, and perhaps most importantly, how it might provide us with still other options for knowing and being, and for being known.O n the Im pO r t a nc e O f prO ce ss e s Of m a kIn g W O r kIn g W Ith a n d a g a I n st) t h e agen cy Of t h I n g sAs important as it is to ask students (and ourselves) to attend to and reflect on the cross cultural and transmodal aspects of texts and communicative practices (e.g. something that can be facilitated through an analysis of an existing text by under scoring how even, say, a traditional looking, seemingly monomodal, print based alphabetic text is visually designed in certain ways and has tactile and even olfactory dimensions) it is equally, if not more, important to create opportunities to do both more and other than this.