ABSTRACT
To make meaning is to remix – to reassemble, re-voice, revise, and re-contextualize words, images, and media from all manner of symbol systems, piecing together, re-fashioning, sculpting, making something else from something found, and thereby, in the end, putting one’s mark, one’s meaning into the world. Yet, for most recent history in the USA, notions of meaning-making other than remix have held sway in most schooled settings, where aesthetically simpler, language-based forms of sense-making and knowledge production dominate, delivered through pedagogies overwhelmingly governed by systems of testing and accountability. It is not surprising, then, that the last twenty years have seen spring up alternative spaces for composing, creating, and making, outside the school day and the school door; spaces often designed to be consciously defiant of commonplace notions of learning, literacy, and being schooled. Importantly, this growth has occurred in tandem with and, to a significant extent has been fueled by, the proliferation of digital tools that facilitate multimodal meaning-making.
