The
aim of Literacy
Revisited is
not necessarily to encourage teachers to use more technology,
new media, and cultural texts in their programs; rather
it is to suggest that students today are conceiving language
differently than they did a decade ago. Children, adolescents,
teenagers, and even adults think in terms of technology
. Even if they do not have access to computers at
home or at school, students are reading and writing with
technology in mind—they cannot help it because it inhabits
and informs their worlds. Students think in terms of hybridity
and interactivity . Their reading path is
guided not by the page or the turning of pages, but instead
by movement to different texts in multiple genres. Their
local worlds are far more global than a generation earlier.
Their awareness of the physicality or, as Gunther Kress
expresses it, materiality of texts is acute because
there are more genres of texts in existence than there
ever have been and they are governed (for the most part)
by the visual. So it is that we have decided to revisit
literacy teaching and to present some ideas that might
lead to more questions and more rethinking.
New
Literacy Studies (NLS) “is located at the crossroads of
sociolinguistic and anthropological theories of language
and schooling” (Hull & Schultz, 2002). Alongside other
socio-cultural perspectives on language that entered the
domain of literacy education, NLS calls into question
the notion of a s ingular model of literacy and
offers the notion of literacies . It allows us
to appreciate that literacy exists outside of school.
The beauty of viewing literacy as being everywhere all
of the time is that it opens up meaning-making to a myriad
of practices that we do without giving them a second thought,
but which build on skills that we have mastered over time.
This is particularly helpful with students who are experts
in gaming, texting, surfing, and creating webpages, and
as we know from countless research studies, these practices
carry with them sophisticated sets of skills that we should
access in our work (Alvermann, adolescent literacy practices,
2003; Booth, boys and literacy, 2002; Dyson, children's
new media and social worlds; Gee, what videogames have
to teach us about literacy, 2003; Knobel & Lankshear,
cybercultures and how they inform literacy practices,
2004; Pahl, meaning-making with new media
texts
in the home, 2002).
NLS
presents us with the fact that literacy is never neutral
and always situated. Traditionally, literacy has been
regarded as being competent with printed texts—whether
reading them or writing them. The term “literacies” emerged
to signal the multiple ways that people use language.
NLS allows us to see that context, identity, text, and
practice are the key principles of any literacy event
whether it is a literature circle in a Grade 4 class in
downtown Toronto, or, a mother and child making stapled
books at home. A crucial factor in our public and professional
lives is the predominance of technology as a primary means
of communication. An implication of technology's ubiquitous
role in our lives is how it impinges on language use and
ultimately, how we teach language in the face of it. When
we talk about technology, it is far more than the technical
skills we need to send an email or type a lesson plan,
we are also talking about the ideological, social, and
cultural ramifications of pervasive computer use. Gunther
Kress and others have argued that at some point very soon
our primary vehicle for communication, and, more significantly,
language use, will be governed by the screen. Such is
the landscape in which students make meaning.
The
New London Group argue that a pedagogy of multiliteracies
“focuses on modes of representation much broader than
language alone.” Their framework encourages an approach
to teaching that situates practice on students' actual
texts, practices, and skills; that overtly teaches skills
students possess inside and outside of school; that critically
frames literacy to peel back the layers of ideas and concepts;
and finally, that transforms practice so that we can teach
language skills that are contemporary and far more differentiated
than more traditional approaches (Cope & Kalantzis,
2000).
Multimodality
is the combination of different kinds of modes—visual,
written, oral, spatial, etc.—in a text's content and design.
Kress (1997) describes modes as the stuff we use to make
texts. I like to think of it as a combination of elements
that create the ethos of a text. For example: an advertisement
that uses a combination of font, colour, illustration,
and words to send a certain message—this mixing and melding
of modalities represents multimodality. Multimodality
can be seen in every text and has shifted how children
engage with literacy. Students no longer simply decode,
skim, and scan, but they move across and among texts,
design texts, create mark-up code, render images, and
so on. Where students formerly understood the layout of
pages in a book, today they read, design, surf, and write
on-screen. We see multimodality in popular media, in animated
texts, and in the kinds of texts students make at school
and at home. As educators, we should not only understand
and use these modern texts, but also come to understand
their place within our classrooms.
Literacy
is about building identities in digital cultures; accounting
for multimodality in children's texts so that students
on the margin are invited in; accepting that students
like different types of narratives in different genres;
and situating our practice so that we overtly and critically
speak to skills they have in abundance but which have
remained relatively unremarked and untapped. It is important
to revisit literacy because it is about students and their
capacities.
The
reference list for this article is in published in Literacy
Revisited, Orbit, Volume 36, Number 1.
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