Foundational Perspectives of Education - Multimodal Literacy Issues
Integration of multiple modes of communication & expression can enhance or transform the meaning of the work beyond illustration or decoration.
It is the interplay of meaning-making systems (alphabetic, oral, visual, etc.) that teachers & students should strive to study and produce. Art, music, movement, and drama should also be considered "ways of knowing," not luxuries. Knowing this, all forms of communication are codependent. Each mode affects the nature of the content of the other, and overall rhetoric impact is duly affected.
The use of different modes of expression in student work should be integrated into the curriculum, with appropriate time & resources invested and allocated.
Later types of discourse (personal, civic, and professional) rely heavily upon alphabetic, visual, and aural works. These are not luxuries, but necessities.
Young children practice multimodal literacies naturally & spontaneously. They can easily combine & move between these literacies.
Literacies include drama, art, text, music, speech, sound, physical movement, animation, gaming, and many others. Poverty or repressed environments can prevent experiencing early literacy foundations. Over-emphasis on testing, plus teaching to the test, can deprive students of these types of multimodal experiences. In the case of technology, exclusive emphasis on digital literacies is not advocated. This emphasis may also limit exposure to other modes of expression.
Multimodal projects are complex. Each individual working on such a project brings different levels of skill and sensitivity. Therefore, such projects require high levels of collaboration and teamwork.
Most commonly known collaboration is the English/Language Arts teacher; they already have models to follow (for example, producing a play). Other common collaborations include producing literary magazines, creating videos, and writing books. Collaboration improves the product and helps the students involved learn more.
The use of mutlimodal literacies has expanded the ways we acquire & understand information and concepts. While we've been doing this since the early days (like mapmaking), it has evolved. We can combine words, images, sound, color, animation, and other attributes with ease; these projects have become a part of everyday life, and can sometimes be taken for granted by the youngest generation.
Readers accessing material in electronic environments can gain immediate access to a broad range of information that has great depth. This has changed fairly recently, as not even 15 years ago, access would have meant hours of research in a library, or requests to nodes that could take weeks to reply. The techniques of multimodal information (acquiring, organizing, evaluating, and using) are ever more important, and will continue to increase in importance in certain areas.
Students can & will become sophisticated readers & producers of multimodal work from an early age. We can help them to understand how these works make meaning, how they are based upon conventions, and how they are tailored to elicit responses from specific communities or audiences.
Student can achieve understanding in these issues by working with teachers. Teachers can assist them in the study of new literacies and how to integrate them into currently understood literacies.
