Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies by Diana Masny
Here is a brief glimpse at the review mentioned in my Goodreads post, that will soon be published in the Canadian Journal of Education: CJE Book Review Masny and Cole
Thanks to Dr Gunderson for
75% of the team names!
The lecture that Dr. Margaret Early gave based on her research into innovative arts-based learning in high school English Learners’ classroom had some connections to the presentation Eury Chang and I gave for LLED 536: Drama and Literacies in Education. One fond memory I was able to recreate for this presentation on Johnny Saldaña’s textbook was a list of team names, based on Dr. Lee Gunderson’s comments (a few years back) on the tendency for teachers to group language learners together in a classroom, so that no one learns from another. He splits up the class into three aptly named groups: the go-getting Screaming Eagles who need little support with language and race ahead of others in the class; the chatty Bluebirds who could make more of an effort to learn but are perched comfortably on top of the bell curve; finally, the Mudhens, who are all sinking together in a mire of misunderstanding and miscommunication. To these three, I added the Angry Birds to categorize the language learners who would rather just be gamers. A lot of my research for LLED 601 and 558 will examine virtual worlds in video games and their influence on students, and one discovery I made through games like Angry Birds is the self-efficacy of players: when they get to tricky puzzle or face a challenge in the game, they can keep trying until they get it right and advance to a more challenging level. The game design even uses gold stars, and it is very similar to an A (or an E) for effort, rather than the Mudhen-teaching strategy where it all of it is too confusing and learners don’t bother learning anything. Even for part of the game that the player already finished, there is the choice to go back and replay the level, earning a higher rank (three gold stars instead of one) than just getting by with the bare minimum. True that this game is part of a corporate machine that has got merchandizing on its mind, there is even a reported daycare centre in China decked out with Angry Bird activities, but it also has some educators talking about new learning strategies, such as this blog post on A Lesson in Assessment FOR Learning. Fine for Team Angry Birds, but what about the Mudhens?
A New Hope FOR assessing students?
Back to the research. One word that stood out in Marshal and Early’s case study was “force” the students admitted to feeling when they worked on literacy mandela: they were forced to speak English, forced to work together, forced myself. While the researchers reflect on these comments and give them an optimistic interpretation of the students’ word choice, there is still something about students admitting that they would not have done this sort of activity unless there was external pressure. On the one hand, it is an effective strategy to make students groups where at least one member had to speak a different language that the others, and English becomes the default language of communication. On the other hand, it still is an artificial situation common enough for the only student in the classroom who speaks Farsi or Russian, but seems to knock away the support Cantonese or Tagalog speakers would normally rely upon: others who understand them. The students need to feel the force from within, rather than feeling singled out because there are too many of “you guys” in the classroom. Cummins et al. present a slightly more student-driven format for learning the language by making it part of their identity creation. It was a little disorientating to read about the No Child Left Behind policy as it relates to Canadian students, but nevertheless, still impressive. Got to hand it to Marshal and Early, howevr, for creating and implementing a wonderfully visual literacy exercise based on student-made mandelas, and three gold stars for referencing Carl Jung at the end of their paper!
Life Magazine show Carl Jung at his Mandela
Like Vygotsky would say, had he lived until the the mid 1990’s, I am entirely in the zone with this week’s readings on multiliteracies. It is hard not to view other theorists (especially the earnest NLSers) as a bit behind the curve. Yet as much as New London Group, Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear and Leu seem to be applying an operational theoretical framework, there are plenty of unanswered questions. The biggest one for me, which might have to leave until next term, is what have the digital literacies people been doing to differentiate from multiliteracies? I expected to find an answer to who they are in Geneviève Brisson’s proposal, but instead found a timely recapitulation of multiliteracies’ development up to a certain point. Brisson hits all the right “multi” buttons with her proposed research, yet there is also a slight disconnect between her framework and the case study itself, as most of the theorists mentioned in the former section do not entire reappear in the latter. In their introduction to Deleuzian literacy study, Masny and Cole (2012) present similar findings in their second chapter, pointing to the transcendental empiricism where virtual experiences in literacy are not tied to any one particular representation, as “[r]epresentation limits experience to the world as we know it – not to as a world that could be.” (p. 27) Perhaps Brisson picks up on the transcendental-ness by exploring what her case study students are becoming, rather than fitting into the model provided by a plethora of multiliterate scholars.
James Paul Gee in digital woodcut
Determining who the multiliterates are becomes a Herculean task, not impossible (especially as they frequently cite their own individual work throughout A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies) but nevertheless daunting to figure out who said what. The strongest voice for me, merely as I more familiar with his writing than most of the others, is James Paul Gee. It is understandable that his earlier work with in critical discourse analysis and NLS needs to be understood fully to appreciate where he comes from, yet I have always pictured him as more concerned with where literacy is going. I suspect there will be a lot more of him when I take Prof. Asselin’s Digital Literacy course next term. It is Gee’s voice, seconded by Gunther Kress, that worked out the design parts of New London Group’s Pedagogy and I am sure once I get a copy of Coiro et al.‘s Handbook (would make a nice Christmas gift, in case family or friends are searching this blog for hints!) they will have more to say about which voice says what. In any case, Gee and Kress have lots to say about how things are designed, as well as the redesign of what technology is available, or as Kress often mentions “to hand”. Taking video games as the obvious lead in to design, recent developments with mobile games (Angry Birds being one of the prime examples), gamers no longer need to read instruction booklets but learn as they play, sometimes with in-game tutorials or often with the option to replay the level once completed. Nearly every video game emphasizes the just-in-time learning, where the skilled needed to defeat the level boss get introduced throughout the same level, allowing the player to hone their skills before facing off with the end of level challenge, the test if you will. The redesign, however, is the most interesting feature of multiliteracies pedagogy as skilled “readers” are able to switch modes to make more personal meaning. Remixing is something that has been around for ages, but has experienced a boost in activity thanks to the availability of digital video, on-line file sharing (YouTube and other websites) and a receptive audience (Facebook’s Like button seems to be the new standard of assessment). It always impresses me how much the New London Group got right back in 1996, at least with connections to what would be possible in the year 2000 and beyond, for the available technology at least.
Andy & Conan predict the Year 2000
What most teachers struggle with is the pedagogical predictions of the New London Group, how much the classroom is changing due to the invasiveness of the Internet, therefore Julie Coiro and Donald Leu teamed up with Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear to produce the Handbook of Research on New Literacies well into the first decade of the 2000’s. Their purpose seems to be to make multiliteracies operational for classroom teachers while also raising awareness of literacy’s newness (and multiplicity). Their prediction of nearly half the world’s population being on-line by the year 2012 fell a bit short with the latest census (dated July 30th, 2012) holding at 34.3% of the world having access to the Internet. The graph below shows the two most highly populated countries, Asia and Africa, are below the world average which can be argued from a statistician or even an economist’s point of view, but I would put forth that educators around the world may be partially responsible. For every BCTF conference or workshop I have been at (I work as a facilitator for such Teaching Teacher On Call (TTOC) workshops as “Reality 101: A day in the life of a TTOC” or “Classroom management”), there is always one or two teachers who insist that children have way too much screen time, and the best place for a student’s smartphone is in the locker, or not purchased from the store in the first place. While I admit there is a tendency for students to get off-task with games and other distractions on the web, it is something the teachers will have to push through, hopefully in a constructive way. It would make for a nice Boxing Day if I could start reading up on Gee’s response to Facer, Joiner, Stanton, Reid, Hull, & Kirk 2004 case study of the mobile game “Savannah”. Perhaps after the nine-hour marathon screening of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Extended Version. The research project I had intended to write for this class would have been on mobile learning through virtual world games, but as this is a case study I am conducting in LLED 558 and more details will emerge from the research rather than frontloading the methodology with expectations based on the framework – as Brisson herself keeps the questions open until she has a better understanding of what is going on with her students under observation. Look forward to connecting to my LLED 558 final assignment when more of it is written.
Downloaded from Internet World Stats
Presenting Chapter Six – But Is It Art?
An interesting topic that combine Indigenous learning with multiliteracies. When I came into the PhD program, I was certain that digital literacy was the place I need to be, exploring the possibilities of Web 3.0 (way beyond what is currently happening with socially mediated Web 2.0) but came to understand that the most innovative approach to digilit research (at least in North America) is a near impossible task of making the Internet perform like paper. It is as if someone is theorizing about Literacy 3.0 by advocating for a return to Literacy 1.0 (pencil and paper, chalk and chalkboard etc.). I don’t want to get too worked up about this back to basics attitude, but will mention how Hare’s article builds upon the idea of “knowing paper” both the affordances and limitations in an Indigenous context. To paraphrase Robert Service, there are strange things done in the academic world by the mostly white and mostly male researchers who ploy their papers. Little connection to land, especially the forests that produce the raw materials. At least there is a connection to the land through paper, who knows where all the plastics and silicon that make our laptops and other mobile devices comes from?! Nevertheless, there is attempt to know better what literacy then and now may mean, and it is refreshing to read how Hare engages her discussion with connection to lived experiences.
Marshall and Toohey continue this exploration of lived experiences with their literacy project using MP3 recorders and hand-drawn storybooks, a case study for representing Punjabi Sikh heritage in primary school. The term used to describe where children are drawing life experiences from is “funds of knowledge” which might cause alarm for critical discourse theorists inspired by Freire to watch out for any for of “banking education”. But the way the term is used here, and gets mentioned in a couple more articles this week, is harmless. In this case study, mostly harmless; the students really seem to enjoy representing violent images. I’ve already posted on the strange attraction students have toward stories that end with death, that can be accessed her with this link, so I don’t want to go over what was already said there. But something I will pick up upon from Marshall and Toohey’s research is smiling characters. Most children draw characters, even in the most strenuous and life-threatening situations, with big smiles on their faces. Not that I want to give too much credit to Piaget’s theory of developmental stages, but there is a point in a child’s artistic life where anything other than a smiling character does not occur to the young artist. Of course, to prove the rule through an exception, one of Gurvinder drawings show her grandfather crying, wearing a frown on his face. Here I will point out that the girl deliberately chose to depict sadness, and it did not take too much effort for her to turn that smile upside down. It is something wonderful to see, when children express theirselves on paper, that they choose more often than not to depict happiness. James Paul Gee (2004) states that the work of childhood is play, and Richard Louv and other play-based researchers agree that a happy frame of mind is best for children’s development (take that, Piaget!).
The Path: ETEC 530 CoP Concept Map
This week’s readings are circling back to my Master of Educational Techonology (MET) program recently completed “at” UBC… I know, I should have used the ampersat symbol to accentuate that most of my studied occurred on-line, but in my first year it was hard to know where to place the Community of Practice among on-line learners (some of them were studying in such exotic locations as Jamaica, Thailand and Turkey etc.), so hardly a community in the traditional sense. I believe both Wenger and Heath were some of the authors we looked at during the program, and the concept map was my first attempt to make it all make sense. And not-so surprisingly now, as I press on with my reading of Masny and Cole (2012) in preparation for my book review (Assignment 2), many of the same themes are coming together. The idea of mapping to show the connections between related ideas was also a big idea when I started my Bachelor of Education here at UBC. One of the instructors wrote about it in his textbook, Engaging Minds (Davis, Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 2008), and while students were not required to actually map anything in Brent Davis’ class, the introduction that I got from him led me continue on with the Education 2.0 studies in the MET program.
One of the most challenging courses in this program was ETEC 530: Constructivist Strategies for e-Learning, and while the readings were a lot to get through, what made this course especially difficult was the expectation to be constructivist while learning together. I should also hasten to add that it was the second term in the program, and perhaps I was still a bit green with on-line collaboration. My partners for the group presentation, however, were resistant to the asynchronous affordances (the techie way of saying we didn’t always have to be on-line at the same time to communicate) this course was trying to support. Rather than working with these teammates, I found myself racing around town (between teaching on call in North Vancouver and tutoring after-school at various homes) to find a free wifi area (usually Starbucks) to connect with the others. There were definitely a few missing components from this community, and more squabbling than social learning from my team members. It even got to the point where the instructor had to intervene, asking each of us to write out what we expected from the others. I am sure that file is saved somewhere, but from that point onward, my group projects became less social, more networked. The oddest thing about this whole ordeal in ETEC 530 was it ended up being my first A+ (95 over the class average of 92) in the MET program, so whatever my partners were claiming I wasn’t doing, my instructor at least thought otherwise!
Being a MET student living in Vancouver was not such an uncommon thing, as many of the other teachers in the program were from here or at least around the Lower Mainland. Every once in a while I would chat with other teachers and health care workers across the province and a few from other parts of Canada. It was a great introduction to the needs of teachers in rural and developing areas. Yet while there were some strange things done in the hinterland, not once did I encounter a teacher from any place resembling Trackton. Perhaps because even the enrolled teachers in the United States were more Mainstream-ish, leaving the former plantation land far behind. Anyone left in these communities, according to Heath, would either be working in the factory or preaching at the church. And yet, despite the numerous setbacks economic or otherwise, the children of Trackton develop a strong sense of self and literacy (perhaps self-literacy, if there is such a concept) because there is a community. The point I believe Heath makes is that children should not be placed in further difficult situations because the Mainstream standardized test scores, but a more thorough investigation of the circumstances the children are raised in is necessary.
When I first encountered Heath, my attitude was dismissive, and now I cannot claim being completely won over, at least there is a bit more understanding of her way and her words. And through the MET Program, which began shortly after Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, I discovered that my hometown had begun its slow descent into Tracktoniness. There is no major industry left for Vancouver’s brightest, most engaged minds: the film industry is slowing down, video game and animation left for other parts of Canada, forestry, fisheries and mining (all damaging the earth) also in decline. It got to the point where the two things Vancouverites seemed to care passionately about were legalizing marijuana and rioting to get rid of a certain goalie. Most of the local teachers enrolled in the MET program got a bump in their salaries, with Teacher Qualification Services raising them from level 5 to level 6 (the highest a teacher in this province gets before moving into administrative positions). Would have been nice for me too, if I had a full-time teaching position. And don’t get me started on the plateauing of public school teacher salaries due to the budgetary schemes of oil-crazed politicians (both provincial and federal). The light at the end of the tunnel, through the MET program at least, was that it allowed me to get into the PhD program at UBC.
SMART/bored: A cartoon created in the first year of MET studies
Lastly, Brian Street. After venting as much as I did about the lowered prospect of anyone who wants to build a career in Vancouver, there is hardly enough spirit left to discuss the academic hit-job the anthropologist Street enacts. Page after page, he sets up one theorist after another only to knock down Olson, Hildyard, Greenfield, Goody, Watt, Bloomfield, Lyons etc etc etc, while Street cunningly never (or at least not yet) offers any counterargument to his theory of literacy. The bottom of this blog page has a transcript of Street comment at the 2011 AERA conference in New Orleans, which are particularly revealing of his continued stand-offishness towards ideas that aren’t his. Enough said on that.
Reference
Davis, B., Sumara, D. and Luce-Kapler, R. (2008). Engaging minds: Changing teaching in complex times. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge.
Masny, D. and Cole, D. R. (2012). Mapping multiple literacies: An introduction to Deleuzian literacy studies. New York: Continuum.
Kind of a weird week to place, with Thanksgiving cutting off one of the classes (Labour Day and Remembrance Day also taking their toll on the Monday-night classes), but in this lull I was able to read more of Saldaña and Chekhov, preparing for the presentation at the end of the month. I also presented a Trailer Making workshop in the Digital Literacy Centre (same classroom as where the Drama and Literacies course happens. For my example, I selected the excellent 2006 Christopher Nolan movie, The Prestige, and demonstrated the steps for making a trailer based on David Bowie’s performance of Nikola Tesla. Will try to upload the presentation on this post.
Not sure if this qualifies as an aspect of multimodality, but my readings over the Thanksgiving weekend (when one would imagine I’d have plenty of time to get into them, seemed to be actively working against me, conspiring with other events to make it nearly impossible to have them all read by Tuesday’s class! Dinner on Sunday evening was the least of my concerns, but my wife cutting her finger while preparing a salmon the next day, her trip to emergency to get stitches and then another trip to recover from the anaesthetic-induced nausea from the first trip all ended up with me at 2 am in the hospital waiting room, trying to read Pippa Stein’s wonkily scanned article on my low-battery iPhone – can any of this be blamed on the new basics?!
New/Old Basics I
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013
Stein’s trip to museum is a good place to start, not only because it was the most legible part of the PDF, but also for connecting back to an earlier class discussion where Anna explained an exhibit that was a slab of marble that every day had milk poured onto it. Her point was that the museum had taken down the title cards, and there was no explanation for what the artist attempted to achieve. While such a curious, innocuous artwork would not have captured my attention (unless a sudden draft caused the milk to ripple, it would have had me transfixed), I agree with the museum’s decision to remove title cards, PDA and any other multimodal method of filling in the gap created by an artist like Frida Kahlo between her biography and the paintings themselves. Nothing against Frida herself, the bio-pic directed by Julie Taymor completely won me over, but if her artwork needs description and commentary by people she would not have met, perhaps the artwork itself is not doing its job. It would be a good criteria for much of the new basics, our own class projects included in this post (sorry to Anna and Liam’s group, I did not get a photo of your fabulous projects), does it stand alone as an effective meaning-making object, or does there need to be another form of literacy to support what the teams created. Please feel free to leave a comment below on your interpretation of the three projects.
New/Old Basics II
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013
Anne Haas Dyson’s brief account of issues that occur with the new basics brings up another unanswerable question: how much of the students’ selves are acceptable to include in their literacy learning? Will it ever get to a point of being too much, and the students have to learn how to self-correct? In extreme cases where racist, sexist or other hurtful language is brought into the classroom, it becomes a stern lesson of what is not allowed. Yet in matters of faith, it becomes a matter of tactfully sidestepping theological issues that shape one person’s attitude. An example of this comes from my TOCing experience, where a class of grade 2/3’s had a guest speaker (called in by the principal to address some of the bullying and less-than friendly ways the students interact with other). The speaker was calm and professional, and wanted to get the class thinking about how nobody is more important than anyone else. This did not sit well with one student, who insisted several times that God is more important than anyone, and couldn’t accept the speaker’s gentle persuasion that it might be true for this student but not for everyone. What is an appropriate response? (Incidentally, the guest speaker told me confidentially that the students at this particular school – that will remain nameless on this blog – had the worst case of stubborn entitlement and it was difficult for any learning, social-emotional or educational, to happen at any grade level). Back to the role of religion in education, it is easy to wag fingers and say how reductionist most religions can be, the whole purpose of any religion is to promote one story while denying value in contradictory accounts. Dyson’s commentary on Tionna and Ezekial’s classroom discussion celebrates the identities these children have formed, and while it seems out of place to mention Jesus or God in an academic article, it is entirely relevant to a discussion on multimodality. It prompted me to ask a question in class that went unanswered: are churches on-side with multimodal education, or does it go against their belief system. Initial reaction might have one believe they would have nothing to do with new basics, but on second thought, Christianity has been multimodal for centuries: cathedrals, devotional song and poetry, and widely celebrated holidays like Easter and Christmas (for starters) are all inspired by words printed in the Bible. In fact, I would not be surprised to find an entire section of educational libraries with articles on religious multimodality.
Multimodal Land
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013
Still there is the issue of basics, the traditional approaches to education mentioned in Marjorie Siegel’s earlier article that run contrary to new and new-fangled multimodal frameworks. Why are some people inevitably drawn back to them? With religion there is a purposeful “tying back” to one interpretation of text, but with schools shouldn’t the focus be on moving forward and developing? Her other article, from 2012, makes an evocative allusion to a fun Charles Dickens novel I recently read, Hard Times where the protagonist (or at least the character with the most dynamic change throughout the novel) is Thomas Gradgrind, a stanch uphold of traditions and the old basics. Books are book, numbers are numbers, and any attempt to make imaginative use of any school resource is frowned upon by this headmaster. What I have found interesting with this parody of extreme rationality is how it gets taken up by people who seem to be missing Dickens’ point. One of my side careers is working part-time at an afterschool academy, to train K-12 students on how to pass SAT and SSAT reading and writing tests – while they have no bearing on local schooling, many parents who want their children to get accepted into American universities will see this academy their children for rote learning skills. Of the many reading passages I have taught, and the usually inane multiple choice question that follow, passages that directly quote or refer to Hard Times seem to take the satire of education as well-reasoned persuasion. Why be critical of these passages, when students need to know only the correct answers to move ahead in life? The best I can do is suggest that students find time to read the novel, or at least watch the BBC adaptation, to get a better sense of how taking standardized tests is similar to being one of Gladgrind’s pupils, and that multimodality offers more than just “fact, facts, facts.”
Each time I get a discourse of critical pedagogy in my hands, literally holding onto a book instead of an article or chapter reproduced on-line, I go to the index and see what names appear in the text. Listings of Gee, Vygotsky, Freire and Murray are good signs that parts of the book will be on somewhat familiar grounds, and every once in a while there are pleasant surprises, like a reference to Shakespeare or the Brontëe sisters will appear (very fortuitous that Dorothy Holland et al. has an entire section on Bakhtin and Vygotsky plus a brief allusion to Shakespeare!). One name I have noticed with increasing frequency is Sigmund Freud, and I can understand the connection between the present texts being read and the founder of modern psychoanalysis. Another name I would expect, yet rarely ever find, is the more radical former colleague of Freud, Carl Jung. This week’s readings put me in mind of this “other” psychologist and the brief outline of his beliefs I had read earlier this year. Understandably a controversial figure not to every scholar’s tastes, still some of the concepts he presents are a wealth of ideas to make connections with identity and culture. This is particularly true in connection to Gee’s interview describing how he got into critical discourse analysis (NB: all lower-case letters). Both Jung and Gee seem to be aware of the shifting positions one will have throughout one’s career, and even the occasional moments of synchronicity that leads to the Big Idea.
Jung: A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Stevens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A just-right introduction to this series by Oxford University Press, although I was tempted to see if Greer’s VSI on Shakespeare would have anything new to say on an already familiar topic. Stevens’ Jung was fascinating, especially as his psychoanalysis is just one of the many brilliant insights into what seems like a vastly complex and some would say indecipherable mind like Jung’s. Not only will readers have a better sense of who they are, and what archetypal influences shape them into individualized Selfs, but we get peeks at the course Jung’s life took, narrated adequately in his own words based on his self-analysis. It will be hard now to get through any of Freud’s groundbreaking works, such as the Interpretation of Dreams without thinking of his eventual breaking off with Jung, as if Freud was only prepared to go so far. Jung seems to have no limits, especially when it come to making sense of a theories as dynamic and multidimensional as the collective unconscious, shadow and mythological influences. As Stevens mentions numerous times, Jung was never one to be tied to one theory, and throughout his long career, everything he thought and wrote would be open to re-evaluation. It is obvious the best way into understanding him more is to read his ideas, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections has sat in my bookcase unread for far too long, yet in a synchronistic way I hope to discover more about my own self more than Jung with reading his biography. I’m even tempted to visit a therapist to see how it all will work out, and I am pleased to learn that his patients were given the freedom to find their Self by their selves. View all my updates
Like Jung, in some ways, Gee discusses at great length how he cobbled together his theories, almost as if he makes up his critical discourse analysis as he goes along. It may be a surprise to some classmates that he does acknowledge Mikhail Bakhtin twice in his interview, but not so much as the intellectual debt he owes the Russian literary theorist, rather how others should not be so beholden to the big ideas from the past. Instead, we get Gee’s surfing metaphor, making his discourse current for the Internet (and surfing) communities of practice: each scholar has to develop a sense of which wave to ride: join the established ones from the recent past like Kress and Fairclough and ride along, or wait for the next wave as Gee seems to be doing with video game literacy, or make some waves of one’s own. At some point in Jung’s career, he began to doubt most of what he had written before (perhaps fell prey to waves of criticism from the traditional Freudian analysis/surfers) and through this crisis produced even more astounding writing on alchemy, flying saucers and answers to questions raised by the Book of Job. Perhaps not as extreme as Jung (perhaps not yet in any case) Gee seems to be turning his back on the once-revolutionary multimodality theory of literacy, and can be seen by some as obsessing over video games. Yet he defends this choice by recalling how Sarah Michaels and Courtney Cazden’s critical analysis of sharing time radically changed the way educational researchers thought about this seemingly innocent primary grade ritual. Especially important topics as serious gamers are already making inroads towards academia. One last surfing analogy: in 2001 there was a documentary called Dogtown and the Z-Boys which showed the inception of skateboarding culture from the surfing community in Santa Monica. The Zephir team (Z-Boys) seemed just as surprised as anyone else that millions of dollars could be made from doing what most people saw as an idle pastime. Already in South Korea, there is a huge industry created around playing the on-line game StarCraft and perhaps a student’s Minecraft skills will be more in demand than an ability to spot names like Jung, Brontëe or Shakespeare in book indices.
Speaking of the index, what exactly is “indexicality” as mentioned in Davies and Harré’s article? Most of the way through this article, I found myself a bit too much in the deep end of discursive analysis, and this notion took me aback. Admittedly, there were moments of crystallization, particularly their example from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, reminding me of Jasper Fforde’s footnoter conversation on the same novel that appears (at the bottom of various pages) throughout The Well of Lost Plots. Anyhow, where was I? Near the end of their discussion on identity-makers, they examine Robert Munch’s Paper Bag Princess, very much an anti-Anna Karenina heroine, from a feminist perspective. Must have been disheartening for the researchers when the students reacted negatively to the active heroine, mostly those who see the poorly-dressed princess as “bad”. Seems particularly cruel as the story itself is designed to assert the heroine’s side of the story and change the hegemonic view that girls must patiently wait for the boys to restore order to the kingdom. I wasn’t a huge Munch fan when I was growing up (a bit before my time, actually) and while I can look back at the radical changes he set for the Once-upon-a-time crowd, at the time I only remember being peeved that boys were portrayed as dumb bullies. Now I am quite fond of children’s literature that pushes the boundaries and problematizes the hero’s journey – most of Fforde’s novels have women in the narrative driver’s seat. And to bring the discussion back to Jung, he opened the door not only for Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces by working out his own archetypal images, but Jung also has interesting theories about dual masculine/feminine identies (animus and anima) that I need to explore further to see how they apply to literacy.
This brings me back to Dorothy Holland, and the first two chapters of Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. While Jung does not appear anywhere in this book, a shadow of anima theory seems to be lurking in chapter one with its evocative title “The Woman Who Climbed up the House” – both Campbell and Munch would have written something relating to Holland and Debra Skinner’s Nepalese field work. The pseudonymous Gyanumaya could not enter the rented house to be interviewed by Holland and Skinner, and her creative solution inspires Holland to write about how some people are positioned in society, and others resist the constraints placed by this positioning. At some point, it may have occurred to Gyanumaya that not being able to enter the house could have simply sent her home, her story never shared with the foreign researchers. It is not here, however, that we find out what she contributed to their study, other than the house-climbing incident; more details can be found, I assume in her 1992 New Directions in Psychological Anthropology article. She does, unlike Gee, have no problem directly referencing Bakhtin and Vygotsky, claiming to be standing on the shoulders of these socio-cultural giants – talk about being a head taller! I am very interest to read more of Holland et al. discourse, and may have some time during the December break to read their work while also starting in on Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Reference
Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. (Jr.), Skinner, D. and Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultured worlds. Cambridge: Harvard U P.
Holland, D. (1993). The woman who climbed up the house: Some limitations of schema theory. In Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey White and Catherine Lutz (Eds.) New Directions in Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge U P. 68-81.
Here is the article from the Canadian Journal of Education: Ciampa 2012
Click on this link to download my article review: Article Review for Ciampa 2012
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