In this article, I have mostly spoken of gesture in isolation, but it should not remain there. Although humans often exercise gesture in isolation, in multimodal compositions, gesture works with other modes to construct a whole, which is why it is important to put gesture in conversation with other modes once students appear to grasp how gesture can function rhetorically with or without the discursive. Placing gesture in conversation with other modes within the constructs of multimodal composition helps students “see” how other modes effect their body, or rather, their gestures. When teachers teach mode through theater and start instruction from within the bodies of their students, students have a physical base from which to judge the rhetorical nature of all modes.
I opened this essay by proposing theater as a methodological framework for discussing the various modes gleaned from diverse disciplines, and I suggested that gesture be an entry point into both multimodal work and dramatic methodology. To support this proposition, I examined two aspects of gesture—its non-discursive symbolization and the body’s connection to the mind—so as to examine how gesture/movement currently functions in the composition classroom and what role drama could have in bringing the mind and body together in multimodal instruction. But this article only skims an otherwise complex topic, and truly this essay cannot fully address an argument for the inclusion of drama in the multimodal course. I titled this essay “The non-discursive gesture: Towards a theatrical framework for discussing the abstract in multimodal composing” because what I have presented is an opening into the utilization of dramatic performance in the classroom as a way to physicalize abstract rhetorical concepts for intuitively savvy but critically deficient students and instructors who want to engage with multiple modes. From here I hope scholars can start to scaffold a more in-depth consideration of how drama can serve as a catalyst for developing a more thorough understanding of multimodal compositions in the rhetoric class.
