Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Well, since the readings for this week weren’t the most accessible and ‘readable’ I decided to think back to week one and explore another side of censorship.

Censorship was really what stood out to me when thinking about “New Media Laws”. The above photo “Censorship causes blindness” just felt so poignant. Since I remember being one of the first people at my high school to jump on the Facebook bandwagon I can also remember the people who immediately jumped on the issues of privacy. What I recall being the concern then was the clarity of privacy for Facebook users. Still to this day this is an issue… what is the extent of our privacy? How much do we know about our own privacy rules, and how much of our lives have we sold to Facebook? Are they censoring their own sneaky ways of stealing our lives? I apologize as I don’t know where else to go with that one… I recognize that I haven’t read the pagesonpagesonpages of rules and contracts that we all see weekly… but even at 16 was I educated enough to understand what those contracts would of meant? Hell no. Censorship of what we know certainly causes blindness, as the picture suggests. Before the birth of the “Internet-Age” who was protecting our rights? Did anyone really know how? I suppose that’s what we need to consider now…

While censorship certainly causes blindness by deleting visibility I also wonder what other people think of the freedom of too much expression?

As I sit here at home (totally un-censored and enjoying the freedom of my hobbit rooms privacy) I wonder when “bitch” started being ok on public television? Edward Wyatt helps me a little in his article in the NY Times, More Than Ever, You Can Say That on television : “The use of the word, “bitch,” […] tripled in the last decade alone, growing to 1,277 uses on 685 shows in 2007 from 431 uses on 103 prime-time episodes in 1998.” (New York Times, 2009) As I’m sure you can tell from class… I’m a bit flippant as it is… and I totally appreciate this age of dirty-mouthed media because it allows for my potty mouth to be perfectly plausible. In a popular media class I took last year I was able to write a paper on the hit movie Superbad. My favorite part of the paper was being able to quote lines like:

Seth: You need to stop being a pussy and nail her. You could bang her before you leave. And I’m not gonna dance around it, she looks like a good fucker.

Evan: I’m tired of you talking about her like that, man.

Seth: What, you can talk about her all day and if I say one thing its blasphemy?

Evan: Well I don’t constantly insult her.

Seth: I’m not trying to insult her. I’m just saying she looks like a great fucker, okay? She looks like she can take a dick. Some women pride themselves on their dick-taking abilities.

Evan: Dick-taking abilities? You think that’s good to say about someone?

Seth: The fucked up thing is, I actually do, okay?

(Superbad (2007), dir. Greg Mottola)

Is a film like Superbad so offensive that we can’t teach it in schools today? In our entrance essays we were asked to give examples of ways in which we were asked to comment on how todays film, social media, etc. has effected today’s youth. Personally I feel as though we have to embrace the change that is happening in todays world. We can’t be afraid of words such as ‘fuck’ and the crude humor that todays youth live for. I’m trying to suggest using the new censorship laws and embrace the ‘taboo’ nature of these dark comedies in order to help educate. With a closer analysis of Superbad you may notice that the female characters that on the surface level are being objectified actually hold a lot of personal responsibility and power; Superbad teaches youth that kids who drink, party, and make fools of themselves end up in trouble while characters like Jules (the objectified girl) don’t need to drink and can actually turn down guys that are drunk. I feel as though we need to radically update what it is that we use to teach todays youth. If we live in the age of ‘old law’ our students will never learn to be a part of todays society… instead they may understand a world they’ve never been a part of.

When I started this post I really didn’t know what I was trying to say… and I apologize if this has been a bit of a stream of consciousness… but with Girl Talk and Lupe Fiasco as my background ambiance I have radically re-thought what “New Media and the Law” are to me. I think we need to have serious conversations about how we can use each popular culture medium that kids are going home and watching as a learning tool. Over and over we are being told not to reinvent the wheel… but what do we do when wheels have gone virtual?!

This is a photo that I found on Flickr with the note: “This photo was taken for an editorial in The Pendulum about university censorship. Karrah and Garrett were both actors in Elon University’s production of ‘Hair.’ ” Censorship and arts is another topic I didn’t feel I had time to get into… but Katie said she prefers when posts have some visual stimulation. So here you go folks 😉

– Brendan

Works Cited:

Flickr.com: Censorship Causes Blindness, Antoon Foobar’s Photostream. Web accessed on Nov 19th. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoon/540693929/>

Flickr.com: Censorship, Heather Cassano’s Photostream. Web accessed on Nov 19th. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/heathercassano/6397100579/>

Superbad, dir. Greg Mottola. Columbia Pictures. 2007

Wyatt, Edward, Media & Television: More Than Ever, You Can Say That on Television: New York Times. Web accessed Nov 19th. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/business/media/14vulgar.html?_r=0>

This week’s reading is a challenging one for me. I wrote my Admission Essay for this program on the negative effects of txt in classrooms. I have always been someone who believes very strongly that it is having a negative influence on today’s youth. I can say this because I notice it having an effect on me and I  was 15 when I starting using instant messaging and 18 when I started to send text messages. Those are relatively late ages compared to children today.

That being said, I have become much more open minded the past few months about a lot of things. This stems a lot from this class. I never would have read a graphic novel or discussed technology as a necessity in a high school class before this course. Thus, I find myself a bit on the fence. I agree with the basic idea discussed in both articles of txt and IM as a kind of teenage lingo that is an expression of themselves. I also think it is unfair to label people who send txts or use txt shorthand as one group because most people these days sending txt messages and using common abbreviations.

What really struck me in the first article was the way it discussed switching between txt language and formal writing. It mentioned that it is the role of teachers to reinforce this. I think that is asking a lot. I find that this generation isn’t very good at understanding this kind of shift. This came up on my practicum. Teachers were discussing the kind of language that they hear in the hallways and the amount of swearing that happens. We discussed the way that we switch our language between how we talk with our friends when we are having a drink, to how we talk at a family dinner, to how we talk at school. It is a concern that many young people these days don’t seem to understand the concept of changing your discourse for your surroundings. They seem to think that they can talk however they want, whenever they want. I think the same goes for writing. When I was volunteering last year, I saw an alarming amount of written assignments containing things like “”bcuz” and “lol”.

I think this means that it is more important than ever that teachers reinforce proper writing because of this but I do think there is an increase in the loss of formal written language and I don’t think that we as english teachers can handle all of this ourselves. Unfortuantely, with so many students in Canada being from immigrant homes, we also can’t rely on parental support when it comes to teaching proper writing. I guess my concluding thoughts on the topic would be that we as teachers (and as parents if we are parents) need to constantly reinforce that there are different discourses for different aspects of life (When we speak casually, when we write formally, etc) and a very important life skill is recognizing what to use when.

My feeling is that these modalities have already changed reading and writing practices, and therefore will assume a place in the classroom eventually, whether one likes it or not.

In the Baron reading entitled “Instant Messaging and the Future of Language”, it is claimed that “the IM behavior of many younger teens is not generally reflected in the language patterns we find in contemporary college students” (Baron 30), yet I find many such ‘behaviors’ interpolated throughout much of the informal conversation amongst students on campus. But I don’t find this a problem – it is just another register to be learnt and deployed when appropriate. Baron goes on to say that “the most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks” (Baron 30). The control referred to here is simply multitasking i.e. students like to engage in multiple IM conversations while doing homework and listening to music etc. Multitasking is said by the New Media set to be a skill acquired only after practicing these new forms of reading and writing, yet although that might well be true, so what? The relevant question to me is whether or not there is a preponderance of studies that demonstrate that multitasking furthers academic language acquisition and sophisticated deployment of various academic registers in various modalities for a variety of ends. My concern is that the claim is just another pseudo-intellectual shibboleth the New Media gurus like to parade around in the hope that if it’s repeated often and loud enough the paying public will start believing it. If there are such studies, how authoritative are they and the academics that designed/conducted them? How independent from corporate influence were they?

In other words, how are we to know, really?

Moving on, Baron unwittingly reveals her unease with the potential influence that IM may have on normative language standards – despite her earlier claim that its influence is benign – when she claims that “IM is unlikely to play a significant role in altering writing standards—unless we as parents and educators let it” (Baron 31). In other words, IM is felt to be potentially harmful, and “unless society is willing to accept [teens] spelling their names six different ways or using commas, semicolons, and periods according to whim… parents and teachers must provide good models and, if necessary, even gentle sticks” so that “teens are also able to master more formal written language style” (Baron 31). The assumption is that teens are incapable of understanding the distinction, or incapable in general, and I suggest that this arises from a deeper anxiety around being displaced, of being inevitably rendered irrelevant. If boomers were in fact immortal and not just desperately frightened of death, I doubt there’d be this amount of fuss, a point which makes for a good segue-way to the next reading, which is playfully entitled “Txting: the end of civilization (again)?”

The txt quote below was submitted electronically by an unnamed 13 year old Scottish girl as her essay assignment regarding her summer holidays, and starts the kerfuffle that resulted in a string of shrill online articles about the putatively corrosive effect of kids’ txting on “standard” language:

“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.”

The translation of this txt essay on offer in the reading is as follows:

“My summer holidays were (a) complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It’s a great place.”

The articles that resulted from this txt essay are said to have created “a discursive chain linking txting to youth to declining standards to poor academic achievement to social breakdown” (Carrington 163). Txting is said to be “represented as the abnormal intruder” (Carrington 167), and that youth are portrayed as “addicts” of txting (Carrington 167). The breathless hyperbole on display in the articles, the caricature of the girl as a nameless, faceless addict, are all evidence of the deeper anxieties I mentioned above. My generation learned to “shift between various types and forms of textual and other language use on a daily, even hourly basis in the course of our daily activities” (Carrington 167), despite the fact that we voraciously read comic books and pulp fiction, and despite the desperately dire warnings that these ‘low-brow’ literary forms would ‘rot our brains’.

In other words, it was ever thus.

Ostensibly, the anxiety is rational – if one is to do well on standardized exams, one must be able to deploy an unsullied “Standard English”, as if that “Standard” encapsulated all that one should ever aspire to be, for as long as the ideologies and biases etc. remain unexamined, perhaps we can continue to live within our capitalist utopia despite all the evidence to the contrary. The “examinations have become firmly established as a high stakes, highly particularized form of textual practice that are shrouded in an institutional aura of difficulty and secrecy” (Carrington 168) for a very simple reason: if the edifices upon which they are constructed were ‘examined’ themselves, the game would be up. Teachers who allow for linguistic evolution and those students who choose to deploy their new understandings in unsanctioned ways are in the articles constructed as Other – ie as threats: the articles “collude to guide the reader to a view of txting as a spoiled version of legitimate text and language use, used by individuals—always young— taking shortcuts and falling victim to a ‘fad’” (Carrington 169). Teachers horrifyingly just may, “wittingly or unwittingly, provide students with the skills to enact substantive social change” (Carrington 169).

So it makes perfect sense that the current hysteria around ‘eroding language standards’ as a result of new modes of text production is constructed unconsciously by the status quo as “a ‘moral’ decline (Carrington 171), rather than it just being okay for it to be about changes in the status quo. “Literacy is always a litmus paper for social change and the tensions this creates and the same increasingly holds true in relation to popular culture” (Carrington 171).

Problematically for me, Carrington herself seems rather too concerned with how to ensure that our students learn the multiliteracy skills they will need to participate “in economic and information flows” (Carrington 172), which for me sounds like code for making money. This is rather too vocational for my tastes, and really when you think about it, how is that end any different than the one our current masters are bent on enforcing?

Finally, I also think we have to be careful not to pretend that the unnamed 13 year old girl who was simply venting about her lousy summer vacation was doing anything other than venting. She was not CONSCIOUSLY revolutionizing classroom discourse. When Carrington claims that “her use of txting was, in fact, quite sophisticated and she was clearly experimenting with how far into other discursive spaces her mastery of txting could reach” (173), I had to roll my eyes. She was NOT “demonstrating literate skills, utilizing new technologies to carry out social functions,” nor was she carving “out a [new] identity within particular semiotic domains” (Carrington 173). There is no irony in the girl’s txt – it was simply that she was too lazy and pissed off to do anything else… but it was a good first step on the road to inventing an independent future for herself, where she could be conscious, and in ways hopefully that none of the current gatekeepers can predict.

Baron, N. (2005). Instant messaging and the future of language. Communications of the ACM, 48(7), 29-31.

Carrington, V. (2005). Txting: The end of civilization (again)? Cambridge Journal of Education, 35(2), 161-175.

When exploring the Internet for examples of e-literature I found one I’d like to share with the class. Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading is an online literary magazine devoted to keeping new and emerging literature at the forefront of popular culture, by connecting authors/editors and independent publishers to an online readership. It was created as an alternative to the passive selection of new literary works that readers often resort to because they are either too busy to research new works to read, or they aren’t sure where to start looking in the deep and chaotic world wide web. In short, it’s an anecdote to simply choosing from the “best seller” shelf at the big chain stores or the virtual equivalent on the online bookstores.

How it works:

Every week the editors of the magazine select a new story to publish.  The next week, they highlight an excerpt of a title by an independent publisher. The next week, an author recommendation. And the final week a piece from their archives. Each week there is also a note from the editor(s) introducing that week’s partner, and outlining their mission and body of work. So they are literally doing all of the leg work for us in terms of keeping up with new and independent published authors.

All writings on their site are available free. (But there is a donation option, starting at .25cents, to help pay the authors, who are all compensated for their work.)

Readers can subscribe by email, RSS Feed, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I’m hooked! I subscribed! I’m so excited for next weeks instalment!  Is this how it felt to eagerly await the next installation of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers in 1836!?!!?

The model of this online literary magazine inspired this idea I could incorporate in my English Language Arts classroom.

Week One: Ask for a student volunteer. Ask this student to recommend any online resource (webpage, wikki, blog, e-lit story, etc.) for another person in the class to examine. That person does so.

Week Two: This second student reports to the class on their findings/thoughts related to that resource. In turn, they recommend to another student another a new resource (webpage, wikki, blog, e-lit story  etc.) that they were led to through their interaction with the initial site. The student does so, and returns the next week to do the same. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

We keep a digital record of every site throughout the year/term and at the end we have an electronic archive of our classroom community e-travels!

To view a three minute video about what inspired the online literary magazine Recommended Reading, view their You Tube video posted on their site:   http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/about 

Thanks!

Maya

Hello everybody,

Just a quick note that I will be posting parts of my presentation and resources I discussed and shared with you within the next few days.

Until then (or at any time), if you have any burning questions related to film or teaching in general, please feel free to e-mail me.

teachingfilm2012@gmail.com

Thanks, and good luck with your practicums!

Claire

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

Hello LLED 368,

As an introduction to my presentation this Wednesday, be sure to check out the following videos before class. These videos set up my topic quite nicely and they should give you a further sense of what E-literature is on top of the assigned readings. Enjoy!

The Electronic Literature Exhibit:

E-liteature Explained:

Louise 🙂

Well. This is timely.

Newsweek is ending their print version this year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/newsweek-ending-print-digital_n_1978265.html

Discuss!