Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

For our first media project we created a graphic novel adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Media Project 1 Writeup

The Masque of the Red Death – Graphic Novel

For our media project, we decided to paraphrase Macbeth Act 2, Scene 3 into tweets. See rationale and presentation attached.

Campbell, Coleman, Law, Lee, Solis – Media Project 1

Campbell, Coleman, Law, Lee, Solis – Macbeth and Twitter Presentation

For the first media project, I took an excerpt from Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water to hypertext in this blog (see what I did there?).

Media Project 1 Rationale

Castell, Jenson, and Taylor’s article discusses the development of a web-based game titled Contagion and how all aspects of the game should be educationally valued. The authors explain how one of the biggest challenges with gaming is having society view web-based games as information-rich cultural texts. Web-based games are known for their “high-speed shooting, killing, the melee, destruction, and havoc” (592), Castell, Jenson, and Taylor state. Contagion breaks this stereotype; this game is a “role-playing adventure game…[that develops through] health-regarding knowledge, orientations and behaviours necessary for promoting individual and community well-being in the face of four quite different, but equally virulent diseases” (591). As this article continues to explain about the game and how the designers of the game created it, the more of a believer I became on how games could be introduced in classrooms. The “learning” does not take place explicitly by playing the game; instead, it happens through relational aspects of the game, such as picking a character, goals, and game structure. The article perfectly sums up how the learning goal of any educational game is “to stay in a game that invites and enables you to learn and try and be things that everyday life defers” (597). Educational games give students the opportunity to learn about issues that they would not be able to experience otherwise. By playing Contagion, students are able to use their critical thinking skills to analyze ethical dilemmas, character development, social responsibility, and much more.

I really enjoyed reading this article because although I have always thought about introducing web-based game to my future classrooms, I was not sure how this would exactly work out. I believe one of the biggest issues teachers may have in introducing gaming in classrooms is that there is concern on how students would be assessed. How can a teacher assess students based on their score in a game? In addition to assessments, stigma surrounds gaming because of the mainstream games that exist. As a future teacher, I would not know where to even start to look for educational web-based games to use in high school classrooms. Workshops that focus on web-based games and how to incorporate them in classrooms would be very beneficial. By merging gaming and education, students would be far more engaged than using the traditional methods of teaching. Gaming does not have to hold a negative connotation to it; perspectives must change in order to slowly integrate gaming into classrooms.

-Nabila

References

First of all, the article in itself is a meta-commentary on the instantaneous nature of much of our communication and media today. Whether this is intended seems irrelevant but intriguing nonetheless. The medium is, indeed, the message. This is not to say that this article does not pack a great deal of punch in terms of making a statement on issues and ideas we face on a daily basis.

To begin with a bit of a digression, reading this piece reminded me of recent discussions of how English is now often referred to as Englishes in critical-theoretical circles. David E. Kirkland, in “English(es) in the Urban Context,” discusses the how English Language Arts teachers need to navigate through teaching more academic English but also acknowledges that students use other ways of speaking (ones traditionalists would often consider lesser). Kirkland essentially argues that other “Englishes” (essentially differing vernaculars) should very much be acknowledged and included in our teaching but that they be tempered with the more formalized language that students will need when applying for jobs, taking university courses, etc. This meshes quite well with what Baron is trying to say in her analysis of IM inside and outside the classroom. She argues that teachers and parents should ensure these forms are included in what, how, when, and why we teach. IM and texting do not seem all that threatening at this juncture but it can be difficult to predict where these sorts of technologies will carry us. Baron, in her research, also makes an interesting observation that not only are there are certain stratum in IM and texting but also that the research:

Suggests that IM conversations serve largely pragmatic information- sharing and social-communication functions rather than providing contexts for establishing or maintaining group identity. (Baron 30)

We have the expected language of texting (e.g. “lol”, “ttyl”, “brb,” etc.) but people are using these forms of communication deemed “above” the commonly used “textspeak” that many of us are familiar with. This idea, then, brings us into a discussion of registers. We all speak differently depending on the context we are in and with whom we are interacting. This is taken a step further in terms of how we use a very specific medium. Texting, IM, Facebook messaging, etc. can all be used at different levels and with different results. Baron also recognizes that there is trend of people using IM as a sort of “voicemail” or away message. The person, or “user,” is not physically interacting with the medium but they are still sending information to be decoded by the receiver or viewer of that message. The author also, somewhat hilariously, notes that subjects of her research were found to interact “face-to-face” though she seems to put this at par with activities like “listening to music,” “surfing the Net” (an already seemingly outmoded turn of phrase it seems), and “eating.” Regardless of what is going on while we are texting, we are using IM “Englishes” to communicate, form bonds, and to be included in social groupings – as are our students. Baron also makes an interesting point of including the idea that IM and texting are mediated and manipulated by ever-advancing predictive text and auto-correct technology which can often blur the line/transition between what we think, write, and send to others in our correspondence. This, perhaps, means adding yet another layer to the multiple registers within the realm of text, i-, e-messaging, etc.

-George Frankson

Works Cited

Baron, Noami S. “Instant messaging and the future of language.” Communications of the ACM 46.7 (2005): pp. 30-31.

Kirkland, David E. “English(Es) in Urban Contexts: Politics, Pluralism, and Possibilities.” English Education 42.3 (2010): p 293.

For our “Media Project: One”, we  decided to experiment with using images to respond and represent an iconic and canonical English language poem: W.B. Yeats’ ” the Second Coming”. The process of creating this product is described in the below .pdf:

Media Project One – Visual Media Literacy

To view the film that we produced, please visit Youtube and leave a complimentary comment!

For our first media project we decided to adapt Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends” using Instagram and Stupeflix.

Here is our video:

“Where the Sidewalk Ends”… and Instagram begins.

And, here is a .pdf of our rationale and our rough rubric for assessing such a product:

Media Project 1

May the English(es) be with you!

-Leona, Naz, Dalyce, and George

In “Rereading ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’: Bodies, Texts, and Emergence” (2013), Kevin Leander and Gail Boldt refreshingly challenge an aspect of education that often receives little criticism. Rather ironically, this overlooked element is precisely the privileging of critical thinking in education and the admonition to educators of producing a generation of critical thinkers. Leander and Boldt argue that examples of “disciplined rationalization of youth engagement in literacies” like that contained in the New London Group’s seminal article “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” (1996) is a “vision of [literacy] practice involv[ing] a domestication that subtracts movement, indeterminacy, and emergent potential from the picture” (23, 24). According to them, the danger of such a model is its conformity to a one-dimensional linear educational project: guided practice supervised by the teacher fostering the attainment of prescribed criteria for intellectual development, which can then and only then lead to independent criticism and transformative production by the students in their own right. Leander and Boldt note that this pedagogical formula corresponds to the notion of history as teleological time – a steady and inexorable progress towards a predetermined ideal of political or social life – which implicitly represents the new society as one created after not during education (28). While not wanting to jettison the critical element of literacy education, they ask educators to consider the possibilities that might emerge if we stop exclusively asking our students and ourselves “what does a text mean” and instead explore questions like how do they work, what can they do, and how can they be used? (25).

To my mind, Leander and Boldt’s framework is an aesthetic intervention that reconfigures subject-object relations in a radical fashion. I see it to be useful for sketching a connection to commodities that is difficult to imagine in the virtual and consumerist economy of our contemporary neoliberal moment: if I have trouble theorizing a different relationship from that of owner, consumer, critic, or reader to objects like novels, films, or videogames, the affective and embodied perspective of Leander and Boldt’s “user”offers alternative values and insights that can be helpful in resituating my engagement with narrative. Instead of charting or locating the effect/affect, purpose, or meaning in a particular work, I can experiment how cultivating a relationship with a textual object can influence my perception of narrative as well as my link with others. It seems to me then that the fundamental notion that Leander and Boldt are proposing in their article is a shift in literacy practice from representation to relationships through a focus on embodied affect. But what is affect?

In Parables of the Virtual (2002), Brian Massumi posits affect as that which slips out of our grasp, as the remainder that lingers and disturbs representational forms instead of something that instills the represented image with emotion. For him, affect can only be registered as that which escapes cognition: emotion as a trace that preserves an echo of the affect that produced it. He writes, “Affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another” (35). Can affect be represented then or only embodied through relationships? If the representational form of emotion is merely the shorn husk of affect or, conversely, affect is the always already inexpressible excess of represented emotion, it would seem that we are trying to represent rather than relate. As Massumi reminds us, we lose sight of the fact that affect is a social property, transmitted and produced by actual bodies through their relations with their senses and with each other. Why, then, isn’t the focus on exploring the social relationships produced through and by affect? As Leander and Boldt argue, perhaps it is far more productive to consider the practice of literacy as a unique performance that engenders a change in human relations rather than a subject that seeks to enlighten personal attitudes. Our relationship to objects is indicative of our relationship to other human beings. As such, a pedagogical methodology should be less concerned with locating and charting the effect and influence of meaning in literacy texts and more interested in exploring the types of affective relations with literacy texts that we hope to cultivate with each other in the present.

BJORN

Works Cited

Leander, Kevin and Boldt, Gail. “Rereading ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’: Bodies, Texts, and

Emergence.” Journal of Literacy Research 45.1 (2013): 22-46. Print.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP,

2002. Print.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m one of those people who perpetuates the idea that “the movie is never as good as the book.” But Bortolotti and Hutcheon’s argument forced me to ask myself why I felt this way. What exactly about the book is better than the movie? Were the actors not as convincing in the movie as in the book? Perhaps the special effects in the book were more realistic. Oh wait, the book doesn’t have actors nor special effects.  There are so many aspects of the adaptation that cannot be compared to the book simply because they don’t exist. As Bortolotti and Hutcheon mention, I was often one of those people who argued for how “true or untrue” an adaptation was to the original and in direct relation, how “good or bad” the adaptation is.

Of course an adaptation is meant to tell the same story. If this weren’t the case then we wouldn’t even call it an adaptation. Books and movies do tell the same story but they tell them in a very different way. The emotion carried in words and varied vocabulary can be heavy-hitting, but so can the look on a character’s face or the contrasting colours used in a shot. In fact, I would argue that books and visual adaptations of those books can both tell the same story but also tell their own story within their specific medium. Consider “The Great Gatsby”. Both the book and the movie tell the woes of a life of excess and unmet expectations through the eyes of Nick Carraway. However, the movie had the unique capability of telling the story of our current struggle to achieve the american dream. The movie is still set in the same era yet the scenes shot as representations of Gatsby’s grand parties are done in such a manner that they mimic contemporary “party” movies. Compare the scenes in Baz Lehrmann’s The Great Gatsby adaptation and the movie Project X released a year earlier:

Great Gatsby Party Scenes

Project X Party Scene

Both often have camera angles done from over head, there are slow motion shots of sexualized dancing and heavy drinking, and the music is the main audio. Baz Lehrmann successfully makes the comparison between the era Fitzgerald critiques and our materialistic and shallow culture of today. While a teacher could point this connection out to his/her students while reading the book or even hope that the students will make the connection themselves, I believe this visual representation makes a stronger point about how little our focus on wealth and material goods has shifted and does it in a way that makes sense to students. They might not always connect with the references made in a novel, such as the flamboyance and profusion of the Jazz era, but they may be able to once they see that same message shown in their own culture of Hip-Hop and Pop. Bortolotti and Hutcheon were right when they said that change is a necessary part of evolution. An adaptation must evolve in order to fit it’s current environment, and that environment is one that adores visuals like movies and television. So while I do find value in comparing the content of the original and the adaptation, I no longer see a purpose in comparing the quality of the adaptation to that of the original. I will always love books, but one of the main reasons I love books so much is for the message that they carry. The adaptations still carry the same message but they carry that message in a suitable medium that is fit for survival in a media saturated culture. I can now officially call myself a reformed member of the “Book is Better” club.

Bortolotti, G. and Hutcheon, L. (2007). “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success” — Biologically.” New Literary History, 38(3), pp. 443-458.

– Aimee Beauchamp

In this article, Len Unsworth discusses how teachers who are entering the workfield need to have an understanding of the literary forms that are emerging online, and must try to incorporate these new literary forms in their teaching. Unsworth uses one example of video games in his article. As Gee states, in Unsworth’s article, “video games are a new form of art. They will not replace books; they will sit beside them, interact with them, and change them and their role in society in various ways” (63). New literary forms are not trying to replace traditional forms in Unsworth’s perspective; they are meant to be supplemental to traditional forms and have the ability to work side by side to strengthen student engagement, resulting in new ways of learning.

In detail, Unsworth discusses three frameworks that work to develop e-literature and online literary resources in classrooms. The first is an organisational framework, which describes the articulation of book and computer-based literary narratives. The interpretive framework addresses the correlation of images and text to construct meaning. The last framework is pedagogic and concerns itself with e-literature and classroom literary learning.

After explaining each framework in much detail, Unsworth goes on to state that teachers feel unconfident in their abilities when it comes to using new literary forms in their classrooms. By using teachers’ knowledge on content and students’ knowledge on new literary forms, Unsworth believes that teachers and students can merge together to share the enjoyment of learning, where each side is benefitting. As Unsworth discusses, “On the basis of students’ greater familiarity with systematic knowledge of the topic, the teacher then moves to emphasise more critical framing to provoke critical questioning by students and a shift towards transformative knowledge” (71). The classroom will become much more student-centered as students are able to take on a more hands-on approach while teachers give the students the autonomy to work.

As a future teacher, I feel like it is quite impossible for teachers to use all types of new online literary forms in the classroom. Not all students would benefit from using e-literature; to this day, I prefer reading a book in hard copy than reading it online, and I’m sure many others feel the same as well. Of course, teachers must keep up with mainstream culture to help students create links between schooling and their lives. But where do we draw the line?

References

Unsworth, L. (2008). “Multiliteracies, e-literature and English teaching.” Language and Education, 22(1), 62-75.

Nabila Jessa