“In the modern world, print literacy is not enough.”
I have been working through the reading thinking long and hard about how these ideas translate into a 21st century classroom. The readings over the past few weeks have identified and explained a few key ideas.
- Communication is and always has been multimodal. Meaning communication comes in many forms and each of these forms have specific pros, cons, efficiencies, and obstacles to overcome. Not only that, but multimodal communication comes with specific understandings and meanings in each context. Being literate in each context involves some key specifics.
- The balance between writing and images is in constant flux. Many commentators and researchers acknowledge that writing is losing its weight in the balance and the importance of images and visual aspects are growing in importance.
- I believe one of the most important ideas from “As We May Think” is the fact that literacy is a part of every faucet of our lives including science, math, technology, and all other discipline areas. Understanding the ideas put forward and asking questions to solve problems that are starting to emerge involve literacy skills no matter the context. As access to and increased inventory of information continues to grow, these skills become even more vital.
- I loved Heim’s quote in the course content – “The word processor is the calculator of the humanist…”. The comparison to the calculator creates a context for understanding. Not only did the calculator make seeking solutions and answers much more efficient, it shaped the way scientists and mathematicians ask questions and navigate the answers. In this way, not only has the word processor made literacy skills and life easier, it has shaped the future of literacy by influencing the process and product.
The further I have worked in this course and the more I have reflected, the stronger my opinion grows that referring to literacy as simply the ability to read and write is an overtly simplistic representation that does disservice to the skills, abilities, and thought processes individuals – including our students – need to be successful. Literacy is the ability to read and understand text. It is in the definition of text that literacy expands. Prose, photographs, poetry, song lyrics, graphs, legal documents, etc., etc., are all texts that require a vast set of skills. It is the ability to write and create text as well as writing about text in a specific domain that makes a literate individual. Even within the musical domain, a given person may understand the vocabulary and details in a pop song but not folk song. This does not make them illiterate. It simply specifies an understanding in a specific area.
As I was traveling down the TransCanada highway working and reworking these ideas in my brain, feeling like I had reached a new level of understanding, I started to be troubled by the demands on literacy in the 21st century. With so many domains of literacy, where is our focus as educators? Does understanding one literacy domain translate to greater understanding in additional domains? Which domain is that/are those? Furthermore, who gets to decide? Literacy is multimodal, a point I happen to support with fervor. But how do we as educators determine the most important modalities?
I was doing a survey of students in June based on personalized learning. I handed out little slips of paper with sentence starters but beyond that, their answers were their own. To complete the prompt “Personalized learning means…”, one student in grade 8 finished with this sentence:
Personalized learning means…I get to choose what I want to learn about instead of the teacher getting to.
This was a powerful statement with specific word choice that was all her own. It is a view I had never taken. This student (and I would argue that she is not alone in her sentiments) clearly feels that teachers get the privilege to choose what the class learns about and in a simple sentence, explains how important this choice is to her.
This idea made me realize that we as educators do not have to choose on our own. We balance the modalities and literacy skills that we know to be important with the needs and voices of our students.
The title of this post is a quote from the Semiotic Domains article.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic, 1-28.
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knkowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 5-22.
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 1-28.
I understand your point of view that with this habitual and routinal googling, video streaming, chatting, blogging and wiki, our students have become self-reliant with technology. They think differently and want to learn differently.
According to Pensky (2001), “students of today quickly adapt to the navigation potential and the processing of different modes within digital texts”. As a language and a literacy teacher, I get many opportunities to apply multimodal strategies in my classroom. Techniques like think/pair/share, peer edit or creating visual representation of the reading, all these strategies work great in primary grade levels as it gives a greater chance to students as they explain their learning in their own words. Neuroscience research has also revealed that significant increases in learning can be accomplished through the informed use of visual and verbal multimodal learning” (Fadel, 2008, p. 12). From my experience of teaching low achieving students when they are engaged in talking by using their own language to make sense of learning, they easily incorporate new information into prior knowledge. These types of learning experience help them to improve their attention that leads to improve learning performance. That being said I also feel that with all innovation, we are currently in a transition stage where educational policy and curriculum documents have not yet adapted to changes that have occurred with the range of digital media that are becoming embedded in people’s lives.
One final thought as a literacy mentor, I strongly feel that even though we incorporate digital tools and digital communication technologies but still we need to explicitly teach the basics of reading, writing, grammar, spelling and punctuation and other language skills.
Reference:
Fadel, C. (2008). Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says. San Jose, CA: Cisco Systems
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. In M. Prensky, On the Horizon, MCB University Press, 9 (5), Accessed on July 19th, 2015, from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Hi Allison,
Your post contained a lot of thoughtful observations. Module 4 had a lot to digest!
I agree that multimodal communication requires understanding of contexts, cultural literacies in themselves. As Kress wrote, communication is “always and inevitably multimodal, and each mode available for representation in a culture provides specific potentials and limitations.” (Kress, 2004) I also love thinking of affordances such as speech, time, sequence, space, display and syntax as elements of design. Writing may or may not be central; reading is redefined.
On the other hand, ideas don’t always match reality. For example, in one response to Kress, Paul Prior points out that not only websites have multiple entry points. So too do an array of genres with “self-organized reading paths” including but not limited to newspapers, magazines, dictionaries, encyclopedias, cook books and restaurant menus in a long list (Prior, 2004). Today’s tools with which we present content have enhanced design and access, but some concepts are not “new” in storytelling. Furthermore, Prior writes, “I know of no evidence that those who work with images rather than words find the media and tools they work with so pliant…” (Prior, 2004) Words need images, images need words, and multimodal forms of representation and communication will always rely on each other to varying degrees.
Regarding personalized learning, student-directed learning is motivating, and I agree with you about balancing needs. Kress writes, “in this new semiotic world, it is the readers who fashion their own knowledge, from information supplied by the makers of the site.” (Kress, 2004) We all need agency to communicate and carve our own learning. Joi Ito said, “Education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself.” (TED, 2015) That may be true, but in the quest for new literacies and the fluid shifts between varying levels of orality and literacy among us, I would hate to dismiss the long-valued role of guide and mentor (i.e., teacher) in the learning process, a process we engage in as educators ourselves.
Thank you!
Julia
References
Ito, Joi. (2014). Want to innovate? Become a ‘now-ist’. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/joi_ito_want_to_innovate_become_a_now_ist
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition 22: 5-22.
Prior, P. (2005). Moving Multimodality beyond the Binaries: A Response to Gunther Kress’s ‘Gains and Losses.’ Computers and Composition 22: 23-30.
Hi Allison,
I share in the same sentiment that as a teacher in the 21st century, it can be a overwhelming to think of literacy as being multimodal. By no means do I whole heartedly adhere to the ‘digital native’ vs ‘digital immigrant’ metaphor put forth by Prensky (2001), I do see some of the tendencies he speaks of regarding students today, and their preference for demonstrating their work in multiple modes of representation. As a teacher this is both exciting and daunting, as the variety of representation hopefully leads to more authentic connections for students between the course material and their assignments, but also it poses a challenge for teachers regarding the assessment methods we choose to employ to evaluate such assignments.
The changing nature of assessment and representation is nothing new to education, and as we have learned through this course, technology is in a constant process of remediation, and so too does or pedagogy need to change with the times. As Bayne and Ross (2007) point out “each new generation of students asks us continually to re-think our understanding of the project and purpose of education, both online and off”. As you have pointed out in your post, the proliferation of internet based technologies do allow for students to personalize their learning, however, as teachers the challenge will be to facilitate that learning, while still meeting the learning outcomes put forth by the Ministry of Education.
References:
Prensky, M. 2001. Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon 9 (5).
Bayne, S., & J. Ross. 2007. The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: a dangerous opposition. Annual Conference of the Society for Research in Higher Education.
Thank you Alison for this commentary;
First, I agree that communication is multi-modal. We as human beings possess multi-sensory means of interacting with the world around us so the same should follow when it comes to the means of communication. “Humans have a multitude of senses. Sight (ophthalmoception), hearing (audioception), taste (gustaoception), smell (olfacoception or olfacception), and touch (tactioception) are the five traditionally recognized senses. The ability to detect other stimuli beyond those governed by these most broadly recognized senses also exists, and these sensory modalities include temperature (thermoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), vibration (mechanoreception), and various internal stimuli (e.g. the different chemoreceptors for detecting salt and carbon dioxide concentrations in the blood). However, what constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a distinct sense is, and where the borders between responses to related stimuli lay.” sense- Wikipedia
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/07/humans-have-a-lot-more-than-five-senses/
Then to complicate the issue further there are individuals who have the ability (synesthesia) to combine senses in unique ways:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
You hit a key point when you write “…referring to literacy as simply the ability to read and write is an overtly simplistic representation that does disservice to the skills, abilities, and thought processes individuals – including our students – need to be successful. We tend to wrongly reduce the complex to the minimalist.
Literacy is very much a ‘part of every [facet] of our lives’. In fact I would say it is the electricity that powers our learning, that makes our brains ‘spark’. Without having the appropriate skills to keep that electricity free flowing, knowledge absorption and any resulting growth is hindered.
Students need to learn the skills to understand the modes of texts and that they have choices.
“Personalized learning means…I get to choose what I want to learn about instead of the teacher getting to.” While this statement is potent it also demonstrates only the student view. If education were left up to the students they would become literate in, as you say, specific areas such as only pop music and not earn how it was influenced by early jazz or its predecessors in classical music.
One of a teacher’s roles is to ’round out’ the educational experiences of each student with their understanding of the process, not to set them off in only specific directions. Many a student will learn what career path they will attempt by learning through elimination what doesn’t appeal to them. There is where their input should be acknowledged. By sending literate electricity off in new directions, can’t help but spark new thinking, enlightenment.