ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace to observe that communication in the 21st century is no longer limited to print-based forms of literacy. The digital world’s reduction of the elementary modular unit for the production of textual meaning from the character of the printing press to the zeros and ones that underlie computer code has resulted in the ability to make, store and distribute sound, language and still and moving images through the same media because they can all be reduced to a common platform. Far from the analog world, the proliferation of new communications technologies has shifted the capacity for combining representational modes from technical specialists to households, classrooms, cafes and libraries. Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal – in which linguistic modes of meaning interface with visual, audio, gestural and spatial patterns of meaning (New London Group, 1996, 2000). Observations on the unprecedented transformations in communication due to the pace of change have also become commonplace. To take one measure, the scale of Internet access has reached a point where one-sixth of the world’s population has access to the Internet with one-half of the world’s population due to be online by 2012. These figures belie divisions among regions, countries and agegroups. However, speed and scale of growth in Internet access in regions with the lowest current access rates, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, are clearly apparent (Internet World Stats, 2006). A profound shift is also occurring in the balance of agency as workers, citizens and learners are increasingly required to be users, players, creators and discerning consumers rather than the audiences, delegates or quiescent consumers of an earlier modernity. Students increasingly spend time in their out-of-school lives using multimodal forms of communication and social networking tools in online worlds, transforming their expectations of and orientations toward texts, literacies and pedagogies. Against this backdrop, state and national curriculum guidelines increasingly embed the need for teachers to attend to digital forms of literacy enabled by contemporary media technologies, and to teach an extended repertoire of new and traditional literacies. But while teachers are encouraged to incorporate multimodal texts and literacies into the classroom, professional learning and
other resources are confined to knowledge about technology and its practical uses rather than knowledge of the meaning-making capacities of various modes. Various contributions have been made to the development of theoretical accounts of aspects of multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; New London Group, 2000; Unsworth, 2001). These accounts of multimodal meaning, while widely acknowledged, were not generated out of classroom practice. The core concepts and language in these accounts for the most part remain highly theoretical, and have not been widely explicated for teachers and students. The development of an accessible and generative multimodal metalanguage, a means by which students and teachers can articulate the functions of components of multimodal designs, has been identified as an urgent agenda item in developing students’ multiliteracies capacities (New London Group, 1996, 2000; Unsworth, 2001). This chapter explores a case study of expanded literacy pedagogies in which multimodal meaning-making is incorporated. In this case, the stimulus for renewed literacy teaching was a professional learning research project (Cloonan, 2005, 2008a, 2008b) involving early-years literacy teachers (students aged 5-10). This chapter will outline the context of the professional learning research, including two key schemas drawn from multiliteracies theory with which participating teachers engaged – a multimodal schema and a pedagogical knowledge-processes schema. Following this, it will detail the classroom literacy pedagogical context in which multimodal texts were encountered and created by students. Teacher attention to different modes of meaning (linguistic, visual, gestural, audio and spatial) as a result of engagement with multiliteracies schemas will be analyzed. A dimensions-of-meaning schema will support this analysis. Further possibilities for teacher generation of a multimodal metalanguage using the dimensions-ofmeaning schema will be explored.
