literacy in the new media age creativity as multimodal design

8/7/2019 Literacy in the new media age Creativity as multimodal design

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In my own urban year eight classroom, the arts were outside my humanities curriculum as I was too busy

orchestrating the progressive reading and writing workshop (Atwell, 1998; Calkins, 1991, 1994, 2000). As

students became wired and their social practices moved in and between online spaces, the workshop model

worked more to divide and subordinate students in my classroom than build community because it ignores

students hybrid identities and the identity fluidity needed to survive in the postmodern world (Gee, 2000a).

Progressive pedagogies required students to act and think in certain ways adopting prescribed identities that

mirror what Lesko (2001) refers to as prescribed by turn-of-the-century reformers (p.172) who ignore the

unstable societal conditions produced by fluid global communication media that have transformed linear class

and power structures (Bean & Readence, 2002).

Desiring to interrupt and transform our progressive literacy practices I embodied Maxine Greenes challenge and

made the arts central to my curriculum. This coupled with acknowledging students lifeworlds and their out-of-

school digital literacy practices, set up the context necessary for students to creatively re-represent curricular

knowledge through multimodal design (New London Group, 1996). The interruptions broke through the

workshop routine and it is my contention that these informed engagements with the arts released my students

imaginative creativity as we collectively worked to combat standardization or what authoritative others were

offering as objectively, authoritatively real(Greene, 1995).

Creativity in the new media age

Facer and Williamson (2004) view creativity as vital to youths abilities to work imaginatively and with a

purpose, to judge the value of their own contributions and those of others, and to fashion critical responses to

problems across all subjects in the curriculum (p.2). Central to their idea is also the notion of collaboration in

creative learning and youths capacity to evaluate and rationalize their opinions; to gather knowledge with/from

others; to share their knowledge with others; and to transform their existing understandings as learners in a

constant process of personal and social development. They make use of the National Advisory Committee on

Creative and Cultural Educations (1999) definition of creativity as an imaginative activity fashioned so as to

produce outcomes that are both original and of value. I like this definition because it points to the social

aspects of creativity rather than the psychological ones. The definition comes close to recognizing creativity

within the social exchange and part of a particular form of recognition in strategies realised in different fields of

play.

Thinking about creativity this wayin the new media ageis sensible because we are born into a world that is

for the most part is entirely social and much of our learning develops by participating in a world where the

presence of others always and already mediates. Yet this world is in a profound state of transition. The change


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in media, largely from book and page to screen along with the change from print-based media to new

information and communication technologies, has changed what counts as literacy because of the affordances of

the multiplicity of modes made available. This is further complicated because individuals have been socialized

into particular media environments, where particular forms of media (books, PCs, MP3 players) and modes

(writing, image, HTML, etc.) are valued differently:

Those who have been socialized into the contemporary media world may be disposed to see the screen as

their point of reference for strategies of reading; those who are socialized into the former media world

may see the page as their point of reference. For members of the two (or more) groups, what appears to

be the same text calls forth different strategies of reading, and gives rise to different readings of what are

in reality different texts.(Kress, 2003, pp. 164-165)

For Kress, reading paths that were formally closed in the past are now relatively open. In the past a written text

was to be read as a written text, yet today as image increasingly supplants words across different media, it is

imperative that schools acknowledge the semiotic affordances of image, of writing and of speech and of

multimodal texts, to see how the relative powers of makers and receivers of texts are reconfigured in this new

disposition (p. 166).

These ideas have substantial implications for the classroom habitus (Bourdieu, 1980) as students increasingly

engage in multimodal design (New London Group, 1996; Kress & vanLeeuwen, 1996) Kress and vanLeeuwen

(2001) describe design as something that stands midway between content and expression where designs are

means to realize discourses in the context of a given communication situation (p. 5). Bourdieu suggests his

concept of habitus should be seen as a method, a way of thinking about the social world and its accompanying

everyday practices. When students engage in design practices, they are sign-making (Kress, 2003) by acting a

specific way in a specific context using a set of available resources/modes of expression, in relation to a

predetermined audience. Because habitus consists of systems of dispositions that produce behaviors, including

perceptions, expectations, and actions in particular or definite situations, creativity becomes a consequence of

these actions as youth transform the resources at hand to design and produce messages/signs and/or traversals

across space. Thus creativity in the new media age is synonymous with innovativeness because adolescents are

creating something new that has value to them in different fields of play. All signs are new as students

combine available semiotic resources (Kress, 2003) and often students are creating new, emergent genres that

are taking advantage of the multimodal affordances of new media (Lemke, 2003). When the workshop

curricula were interrupted a new classroom habitus emerged where students everyday literacy practices outside

of schoolor their established and emerging digital literacy practices were recognized. Teachers can

significantly alter their classroom habitus, not in deterministic ways, by allowing students to engage in


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multimodal design. This in turn offers the possibility of generating a wider repertoire of possible creative design

practices and actions, perhaps unavailable in the habitus of progressive workshop classroom.

The study

At the time I gathered the data for the study, I was a full-time year eight humanities teacher in a small academy

of technology in New York Citys Chinatown. Most of my students were first and second generation Chinese

immigrants who received free or reduced price lunch and each class had thirty students. This work stems from a

larger study (Walsh, 2006) that focused on shifts in teacher and students literacy practices analyzing critical

incidents that triggered curricular interruptions where critical and visual literacy, then Multiliteracies and the

incorporation of digital and multimedia design countered the monomodality embedded in the discursive and

sociocultural practices of progressive workshop pedagogies.

Teaching Creatively

In making arts central to my curriculum, I put aside our textbooks and taught students about the Dustbowl

Migration and The Great Migration of the Negro through photography, painting, folk music, the Blues, jazz and

film. The Migration Unit, our fourth unit of study for the academic year explored the two migrations initially

through the arts, and then incorporated print texts reading them intertextually; assessing their sources and

purposes and their location in historical contexts. We also questioned texts by uncovering gaps and silences and

then categorised them or rewrote ones where our evidence-based interpretations were at odds with the authors.

Through the use of an LCD projector and a high speed internet connection shared over eight computers, we had

effortless access to the photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Jacob Lawrences panel series on

The Migration of the Negro, the music of Woody Guthrie and many Blues, jazz and gospel singers.

In starting the unit, different groups of students were assigned to locate many of the curricular resources and then

we organized them online for easy curricular access. Different groups worked to gather Dorothea Langes

photography and the music/lyrics of Woody Guthrie. Other students designed sites to create visual narratives of

the migration of the Oakies through photography while some gathered primary documents including

interviews, newspaper articles, and ecological information as to the causes of the Dust Bowl. Students primarily

designed all of the resources used in the unit because their acquisition of screen-based literacies was well beyond

that of mine. In this sense, students had a better understanding of what was valid/creative in the field of web

design. Having students use their out-of-school literacies to engage creatively with and design valuable and

relevant classroom resources was surprisingly successful in helping me acquire a similar habitus. Because much

of the work was collaborative, teams of students came together and taught each other many of the ICT skills they

had acquired, thus there all students were able to participate in the curriculum. Unlike texts they produced in the


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workshopthat had a relatively short shelf lifethese texts became central to our present (and future)

curriculum, consequently changing what counts as knowledge and learning in our classroom.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

While students were working on the Dust Bowl resources, I worked diligently, after many student-taught

tutorials, to design sites we could use to investigate the Great Migration of the Negro. I designed a site entitled,


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the blues with a section on blues musicians and a site with selected images from Jacob Lawrences The

Migration of the Negro (1940-1941). Initially students thought the sites were useful, but when I tried to play

them an excerpt from Billie Hollidays Strange Fruit, when we were studying lynching as a factor that pushed

African-Americans north, the song did not load correctly. They complained saying, Chris, why dont you just

download the MP3 of the song so we can listen to the whole thing? At the time I had not idea what they were

talking about. Most of them could read the confusion on my face and asked, havent you downloaded songs

before? At that point, a student got up, went to the computer and downloaded file-sharing software onto our

schools server. A few minutes later, the software was up and running and he typed Strange Fruit into the

search field and within seconds began to download it. Shortly, we were all listening to a more poignant Nina

Simone eerily singing while we read the lyrics on the big screen with the LCD projector.

I realized it was in everyones best interest if I continue to learn web design, but let the students take over the

design creativity. The sites I was designing (Figures 4 & 5 ) were quite text heavy and linear in comparison to

those of my students (Figures 1 & 6 ). Furthermore, I did not have the skills to include popup pages with

dropdown menus of songs by famous Blues musicians (Figure 6). My students were teaching themselves these

complex design skills or acquiring them through different communities of practice they engaged in. This is a

small example of the profound social, economic and technical world which in the end will shape the futures of

literacy (Kress, 2003, p. 176)

Figure 4


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Figure 5

Figure 6

Allowing students to engage in multimodal design harnessed their creative capacity and energies as the adapted

to the affordances of new and complex kind of sign-making. When I asked Danny what he thought about the unit

he responded in the affirmative:

C: What did you think about learning about the Great Migration through Jacob Lawrences painting?

D: I think they were kind ofI never thought they could use paintings to still show us how they were

feeling orit just gave me a different perspective because it was not like showing the actual persons

face, but was giving an idea of how he thought. We would think it could be one thing then another, but

it could be both at the same time.

C: Do you think it helped you understand that time in history , to look at different kinds of texts?

D: Yeah it did because of it would give me opinions and ideas of how I would think of the time,

because it showed me history instead of giving me a reading of a text. It would give me the idea

straight-up, easy to remember instead of relying on the text where you have to remember word by word

probably or even remember the words.


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Yuan also talks about remembering studying migration through the arts:

Y: I definitely remember Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration and all of the lynching photographs, I

will never forget them because at that time you were showing all those art like photography, those Negro

spirituals, and

C: You remember the music as well?

Y: Yeah, all those kinds of arts. And yeah, we did a site on it on how they, how all those things can

portray and depict this era that are better than just print texts on paper.

C: Why is it better?

Y: Because it helps you relive the time better than the history text.

C: You get to see, hear

Y: Yeah, by all of the people who had been through it, I mean history texts are just a bunch of gatherings

of what other people have said. They havent lived through it. How are they supposed to know how it

reallyfeels?

My adolescent students used their imagination to draw on a number of textual and intertextual creative strategies

in their participation and design of different multimodal texts. Within most progressive workshop pedagogies,

students create monomodal texts that teachers usually model in min-lessons. Thus the range of meanings

because additional modes are not presentare often restricted furthering my view of the inadequacy of the ideas

and theories from progressive workshop pedagogies. This thinking is analogous to that of Bernstein (1975) and

Lesko (2001) who warn against reoccurring school practices in ritualized ways that have contradictory effects

that differentiate students. It has been argued that because texts and text practices are historically and socially

bounded and implicated in power relationships, Bourdieusian field analysis (Albright, 2006) may allow

educators to understand homologies between the construction of literacy education in sites that span institutions

such as homes, school, neighborhoods, and online spaces.

Discussion

Creativity as capital

Literacy is always ideological and power is a central problem facing literacy studies like this one. This is more

important when considering issues of access and equity. From a sociocultural perspective, schools and

classrooms are implicated in the distribution of cultural capital associated with particular literacy practices and

textual resourcescapital that is unevenly valued and distributed (Luke, 2000). Unlike a top-down view of

power that simply divides the powerful from the powerless, this perspective locates power in the relationships


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between individuals and institutions (Street, 1995). Additionally, as Kress (1999) and Luke (2000) point out,

literacy studies must attend to the effects of power on texts; that is how texts encode social relationships between

authors, audience and the discourse in which they participate.

I want to illustrate this with a group of my students who decided to compete in a web design project advertised

through the New York City Public Library. The ThinkQuestcompetition was motivating because the first place

prize was a new laptop for each student on the design team. After I agreed to be their coach, students thought it

would be a good idea to use the work we completed in the migration unit as a basis of the project. They enjoyed

experiencing history through the arts and came up with the title of Con Texts, representing the

intertextual and discourse analytic literacy practices we had completed throughout the year. Their website

positions readers to move between different texts to read two historical migrations through the arts. As a

result of our curricular work, they came to believe that most school history texts dont explore the migration of

the Oakies and the Great Migration adequately or honestly (Figure 7).

Figure 7

The students, through our curricular work came to see history texts as highly biased. The construction of the

website represents the multiple literacies the students taught and learned in community and school fields (New

London Group, 1996). They combined their out-of-school literacies and school-based literacies in hopes of

winning the competition. The introduction to the site visually plays with the idea of reading between, across and

against texts with the depiction of the two circles (2 migrations) and the back and forth arrow between them

(Figure 8).


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Figure 8

The same idea of reading between and against texts is presented at the bottom of each page where the

reader/viewer can choose to view, listen and/or read about Woody Guthrie, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, or

The Blues (Figure 9). Unlike the progressive workshop, with affordances available for multimodal design,

students can use their creativity in what Kress (2003) calls ensembles of writing, speech, image, music and

traversals that incorporate the demands and potentials of all the modes involved (p.170).

Figure 9


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Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

These examples reflect how students literacy practices shifted in light of changing social, cultural,

technological, economic and political contexts for our lives and teaching. It also represents how the formation of

their habitus requires and reflects being in particular situations and being with other students in an open system


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of disposition undergoing a continuous experience-dependent transformation embodying its own history and

experiential trajectory (Roth, 2002). As a teacher, I taught creatively, coparticipating with students to c produce

the context(s) necessary for them to engage in a variety of critical practices without necessarily condemning their

cultural terrain. Recognizing students as designers as an essential pedagogic aim (Kress, 2003) offers an

alternative vision for the future development of creativity and literacy that have the potential to improve youths

educational opportunities as representational modes effect the shaping of knowledge.

The adolescent students in this study, as they harness their creativity through design, re-represent curricular

knowledge in increasingly non-linear terms because they seem to understand, from their own experience, that

reading of any multimodal text is shaped by the authors and the readers choices. Not wanting to just showcase

their abilities to the terrain of curricular knowledge, students transferred their design practices to what they refer

to as the present day where they use the same design scheme to illustrate how musicians like John Lennon,

Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Naz and Christine Aguliera critique issues such as diversity, racism,

sexism and war (Images 13-18).

Figure 13

Figure 14


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Figure 15

Figure 16

Figure 17


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Figure 18

Figure 19

The students design expertise won them first place in ThinkQuests challenge. This experience, especially

winning the laptop, was exceedingly rewarding for the students. Importantly, it also identifies implications for

educators, administrators, curriculum developers and teacher educators and the need for broader public

discussions and classroom understandings about the field-specific social consequences of literacy instruction.

Turning to Bourdieus (1986) economy of practice that contends that all human activity or practice involves

exchange between individuals and groups (Carrington & Luke, 1997). I want to speculate abouthow mystudents participation in ThinkQuestportrays students immaterial forms of exchange, or literacy practices, as a

source of social power and control realised through creativity. Carrington and Luke (1997) describe practices

within this economy:

All practice thus is directed, consciously or otherwise, at the maximization of social advantage, the

theory of practice, then, outlines the dialectical relationship between the objective structures of a


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society and the practical, goal-seeking activities of individuals. In such a model, spoken and written

textual practice forms a powerfully mediating moment where human agency and social structure,

motivation and norm are realized. (p. 100)

Similarly, my students are passing through many different social fields in addition to school as they play out

their individual life trajectories. They are what Gee (2000) would call shape-shifting portfolio people because

they are distributed within, and move through, different fields according to the relative accumulations of capital,

each predisposed to pursue social power and a degree of control over their moves ad exchanges within and

across these fields (Carrington & Luke, 1997).

Literacy as a form of cultural capital remains what many would term as Bourdieus principle contribution to

current understandings of literacy (Collins, 1993; Luke, 1995; Carrington & Luke, 1997). The ThinkQuest

contest took place in familiar and new fields for the students. When the students encountered the public, out-of-

school field of the design contest, they realized the field, different from their classroom, recognized and

privileged different kinds of creativity (forms of capital). When students moved into a differing institutional

configuration, they sought to accumulate different literacy practices because they recognized that they offer

particular powers, especially when combined with other forms of capital they already possess (traditional school

literacies).

In competing in the competition the students were striving foreconomic capital(Bourdieu, 1986) and formed a

team drawing on theirsocial capitalor the sum of the resources, actual orvirtual, that accrue to an individual or

a group by virtue of possessing a strong network of more or less institutional relationships of mutual

acquaintance and recognition (Luke & Carrington, 1997). As a result of their group membership, the students

have access to the collective capital and creativity of all of the members in the group and the accompanying

social distinction their membership allows. The cultural capital(Bourdieu, 1986) each student brought to the

team included the differing literacy practices, or creative collaboration (knowledge of different software

programs, curricular knowledge, writing skills, etc.) they possessed that where transmissible to others. The

students formed the team based on theirobjectified cultural capital(the transmissible literacy practices) as well

as theirinstitutional cultural capitalreferring to their academic qualifications and grades as authorized by me the

teacher and our school. The ThinkQuestcompetition describes how a group of successful students draw on their

cultural and social capital resourcesincluding imagination and creativityto design a website that reflects the

acquisition and articulation of students out-of-school literacy skills recognized within the curriculum.

Furthermore, adolescents literacy practices within school, shifted their individual habituses in ways that are

more aligned with new media age representing their subsequent and simultaneous capacity and inclination to

accumulate and utilize fitting capital resources.


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