Multilteracies: (Assignment #1 e. - LLED 441 96A)

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What multiliteracies do you think students need to acquire?  Give examples.  

There was a time that literacy referred primarily to speaking, listening, reading and writing.  That time is no longer.  Today when we talk about literacy we are talking about an even greater number of literacies which include, but are not restricted to, technology, viewing, and creating.  We are also talking about social and cultural literacies (such as understanding and being able to use appropriate gestures and social cues), number literacy (used in understanding and applying science and financial concepts), and digital literacy (understanding and successfully interacting with content in the digital world). These are the literacies students of the 21st century need to acquire.

The term multiliteracies was first used in the 1990s by the 'New London Group' in reference to a specific approach to literary theory and pedagogy.  It came about as a response to increasingly diverse modes of digital communications in an increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic environment.  The 'New London Group' noted an expansion of the definition of media to include text combined with sounds and images (Westby, 2010).  Their "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" addresses the changing needs of students to participate in communication which includes multiple discourses and representation in both public life and professional life and happens within a diverse technological, cultural, and linguistic landscape (Westby, 2010).  

The work of the 'New London Group' is still relevant today and informs much of the push toward BC's new curriculum and what others have coined "21st Century Learning."  I appreciate and agree with the definition provided by Zachary Nicol in his video entitled, What is Literacy in the 21st Century.  He states, "21st Century Literacy is an interactive and engaging mindset used in both producing and consuming content" (Nicol, 2014).  We recognize today that learning is an interactive process which requires students to be active participants.  To be literate in the 21st century means engaging with content by asking questions, making connections, generating inferences, and "being able to use creativity, ingenuity, and imagination to produce meaningful content (Nicole, 2014).   These skills are an important component of the multiliteracies I mentioned above.  

While the term multiliteracies frequently brings to mind digital communication, the muliliteracies that students need to acquire include more than digital literacy.  As mentioned above, students also need social and cultural literacies.  They need to learn to read social and cultural cues and be able to interact within a social and cultural context.  Having social literacy entails being able to interpret facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice as well as being able make inferences based on word choices and styling used in oral communication, while cultural literacy involves being aware of culturally significant relationships, practices, objects, symbols, and vocabularies.  One might argue that social and cultural literacies are important when engaging in digital communications.  For example, it is important for students to understand and use the language of cultural and social cues when interacting online.  In turn, digital literacy might serve to enhance social and cultural literacies as students are able to interact with other individuals in digital communities.  Number literacy is  another important communication tool for students as they use number concepts to navigate within many areas of life, including the financial and scientific domains.  While I have not yet mentioned music or movement, these too are literacies which have become increasingly important due to their increasing appearance in diverse forms of multi-modal communications.  Many digital communications include music or other audio effects for emphasis and videos require knowledge of the language of movement.  

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Teachers can provide opportunities for students to acquire these multiliteracies by designing multi-modal tasks which are student centered and require response to intriguing questions based on personal perspectives and the  students' own interests in the material (Nicol, 2014).  The article Love that Book: Multimodal Response to Literature tells us "there is a growing body of research demonstrating the positive effect of mulimedia on learning, including promising evidence that composing with different modes can engage students in content and develop their literary analysis skills (Grisham& Wolsy, 2006; Jocius, 2013; cited in Dalton & Grisham, 2013). Delvecchio points out that "the push for more multimodal teaching and response frequently is a push for implementing more new technology" but a multimodal response to learning can happen without digital resources (Delvecchio, 2019).  She writes, "What is at hand are the resources of sound, movement, paper, colour, design, and the exercising of planning and conceptual skills" (Delvecchio, 2019).  Delevecchio advocates for the use of storyboarding as a multi-modal outline process which can happen without the use of digital technologies.  When digital technologies are available these can be employed in even more ways to produce an even greater variety of multimodal responses.  The article Storied Lives: Teaching Memoir Writing Through Multimodal Mentor Texts points to research which argues "the digital revolution has afforded far more resources for meaning making than language alone and that this multimodality is changing the very logic of the way in which we communicate" (Kress, 2003, cited in Meixner et al., 2018).  According to Kress, communication is moving to a language of "not writing or even speech, but design" (Kress, 2003, cited in Meixner et al., 2018).  Thus, digital literacy is a powerful tool, though not the only tool needed for students to acquire a variety of multiliteracies.

It is important for students of today to develop a variety of multiliteracies which go beyond listening, speaking, reading, and writing, to include viewing, creating, work with digital technologies, understanding and participating in the making of social and cultural cues, numbers skills, and the understanding of music and movement.  All of these multiliteracies require student engagement with content and participation in the creation of meaning.  One way to engage students in active participation is through the creation of multi-modal responses to questions which are relevant to the interests of students.  While digital technologies can provide powerful tools for multimodal responses, multimodal responses can happen independent of digital technologies.     

Bibliography

Dalton, B., & Grisham, D. L. (2013). Love that book: Multimodal response to literature.The Reading Teacher,67(3), 220-225.

Delvecchio, Jennifer. (2019) LLED 441 96A. Introduction to Teaching Children's Literature. Canvas. Web. Accessed July 2019.

Leland, C., Lewison, M., & Harste, J. (2012). Multimodal responses to literature. In Teaching children's literature: It's critical. Taylor andFrancis, p. 125-236.

Meixner, Emily; Peel, Anne; Hendrickson, Rachel; et al. (2019) Storied Lives: Teaching Memoir Writing Through Multimodal Mentor Texts. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Volume 62, Issue 5

Nicol, Zachary. (2014 August 10). What is Literacy in the 21st Century. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0poR8zfAls.

Reid, Stephanie. (2018) More Than Words: An Investigation of the Middle-Grade Multimodal Novel. Journal of Children's Literature, Volume 44, Issue 2

Westby, Carol. (2010). Multiliteracies: The Changing World of Communication. Walters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 64–71 Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B17en-gb5PmkMmY4ZjVkNjAtNTZhMC00NWY0LWE1MGItMWJlMTY0ODcyODQ0/view