Hypermodality

 

Hypermodality, in Lemke’s (2002) version, centers on digital links. “Hypermodality is more than multimodality in just the way that hypertext is more than plain text. It is not simply that we juxtapose image, text, and sound; we design multiple interconnections among them, both potential and explicit” (300).  Critical performance pedagogy is a hypermodal form of instruction. It is about the way bodies, minds, words, texts, papers, images, sound, paintings, canvases, experiences, etc. all come together and talk back to one another. The sensory experience of change, culture, forgiveness, growth, and learning are all interconnected and inked. The body and the digital come together to create a hypermodal experience.  As Lemke posits (2002):

Visual communication is at its most powerful, not when it retreats into the splendid isolation of an imaginary semiotic autonomy, but when it confronts verbal language head-on and challenges its hegemony, when it takes its place as an equal (and equally often as the leading) partner in multimodal communication. The medium in which both confrontation and partnership, both subversion and empowerment, is most fully afforded today is that of hypertext. Travelling together in hypermodality, we can make meanings that will let people see and speak in new and more thoughtfully critical ways (323).

Hypermodal pedagogy carefully rests upon exploring new possibilities with the expectation of change (Stucky, 2006), engaging the performance of possibility (Madison, 1998), moving through the spaces of resistance within the academy to affect social change (Jones, 2002), exploring critical performance pedagogy (Pineau, 1998), and linking the digital and embodied together, because we can and do co-exist. Civic engagement is a matter of engaging the mind, body, spirit, work, and digital hypertext in meaningful ways, as can be evidenced in the play between voice, digital media, and body in my student’s work.