Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

So — I watched my first piece of E lit. And I was a little surprised to discover how much I enjoyed it! In addition to its engaging multiple modalities, its interactive function is fascinating. “Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China” tells the story of a young girl’s journey, along with her mother, to find her father who has disappeared on the army base in which they live. The 8 year old girl-focalizer is a child of her (this) generation: her smartphone is an extension of her hand. Throughout the search for her father, her phone accompanies her. What is infinitely interesting to me is the way that we, the reader/viewer, are enabled to enter the skin of this girl as we are invited to interact with her phone; when she takes photos of wildflowers, we are clicking on the images, and when she emails the images to her father, we are clicking on the email icon. There is something about this (inter-)active participation that cultivates a certain sense of identification with the character. I have never been a video gamer, but it occurred to me that these forms of E lit have much in common with video games, in which players/readers are actively participating in a story. I spent 8 enjoyable minutes viewing “Inanimate Alice.” It was an affective and engaging little story. But it was “little”, in terms of length/duration. I find myself wondering how I would feel about viewing a lengthy extended piece of E lit. I think about Sarah’s question about whether the high degree of sensory engagement in E literatures might amount to sensory overload. Maybe. Sometimes. Certainly, there is a part of me that is “old-school” and that revels in a print book in hand and a host of words that trigger an inner imagination. Ultimately, I think there is ample room for both. The wonderful thing about mulitliteracies is that literacies are just that: ‘multi’ — multiple and varied. I think E literatures, like other forms of literature that we have spoken about throughout the term, would be a great way to hook students into a given theme or idea and can be a wonderful supplement to other forms of literacy. Certainly, they can be very useful for engaging diverse learners. The synthesis of image and word is affective. But with E literature, there is something more that I’d like to come back to: there is the possibility (at least in some cases) of the reader as participator — physically, (inter)actively. I am thinking particularly of the smartphone reader interaction episode in “Inanimate Alice”. This dynamic notwithstanding, an enduring question nags me:  Is there something more or less active in turning a page versus clicking a mouse?

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/pullinger_babel__inanimate_alice_episode_1_china.html