today was the first day of the 'Redesigning Pedagogy' conference, hosted by the CRPP.
among the sessions was the paper and plenary by Chris Walsh and Jim Albright of Teachers' College, Columbia.
they shared their work on multimodal semiotic discourse analysis of hypermedia authored by children from a school in Manhattan's Chinatown, as well as their work on multimodal reading and design in the cross-disciplinary curriculum that they have come up with for that school.
stuff which i learnt and / or interesting ideas which occurred to me today include:
- children from disenfranchised minority groups really hold the power in traditionally-run classrooms, because the carrot of academic success (leading to economic advancement) means little to them; instead, minute-by-minute victories should be emphasised (D'Amato)
- Walsh and Albright are primarily interested in assessing the design of pupil-authored hypermedia. they are responding to Kress's call, because "language is no longer the central semiotic means to understand literacy" (which would seem to fly in the face of Kathryn Au's interesting definition of literacy as "higher level thinking with _text_")
- Kress makes the preceding claim because he says that our brains constantly perform synaesthesia, which is the "transduction of meaning from one semiotic mode to another". Kress is of course a member of the New London Group (which also includes Allan Luke and Courtney Cazden). The New London Group is responsible for the seminal 'a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures' (1996) in the Harvard Educational Review
- the multiliteracies pedagogy comprises:
(a) situated practice (doing): raising issues that relate to students' social locations and the employment of a wide variety of texts and simulations from these spaces;
(b) overt instruction (reflecting): systematic, analytic and conscious introduction of explicit metalanguages ("grammars") which help students describe and interpret the different ways in which meaning is made (so, for example, Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammars might be taught explicitly to pupils with a view to helping them in the interpretation of pictorial sources (specifically 'orientational meanings') in Social Studies, another idea would be to get pupils to rewrite portions of the textbook, as well as to compare different textbooks for gaps and silences regarding a common topic). these visual grammars form part of Walsh's and Albright's toolbox which allows them to cross-disciplines;
(c) critical framing (reflecting): interpreting the socio-cultural contexts and values of particular ways of making meaning, developing a critical distance on ways in which knowledge is structured and used;
(d) transformed practice (doing): students using what they have learned to reconstruct texts and knowledge practices in new ways and in different contexts
- the multiliteracies pedagogy therefore describes:
(a) the designed: the available meaning-making resources;
(b) the designing: the process of shaping emergent meaning through re-presentation and recontextualisation (which, by definition, can _never_ involve a repetition of the designed);
(c) the [continually] redesigned: the outcome of designing which the meaning-maker (Halliday's 'meaner' - one who means) has remade himself
- the instructional design in my own research fits well into the multiliteracies pedagogy, in that the students were taking the knowledge they gained from the curriculum (the designed) and transforming (designing) this knowledge in the field into what Mitchell would term 'imagetext' (eg, the MMS and the gallery-walk maps) and eventually the final PowerPoints (the redesigned)
- Lemke elaborates that the meaning potential of multimodal constructs is the logical multiplicative product of the capacities of their constituent semiotic resource systems, using the common denominators of 'presentational meanings' (the content being presented), 'orientational meanings' (the stance of the participants to each other and to the content) and 'organizational meanings' (eg, structural units and catentative chains which background and enable the other two kinds to achieve greater degrees of complexity). Lemke believes that conscious attention is not often paid to either orientational or organizational meanings.
- expressed another way, the specificity and precision which is possible with an imagetext is greater than what is possible with either text or image alone. the corollary of this argument is of course that (as Lemke acknowledges) at the edge of new meanings, people require more guidance from the multi-modal representations because of the greater uncertainty in what the new meaning implies (witness, for example, the combination of video with text in a multimedia message)
- the multiliteracies pedagogy has its roots thus: Malinowsky -> Firth -> Halliday. Halliday talks about three basic strata constituting the linguistic system. the two lower strata are the lexicogrammatical (syntax, lexicon and morphology) and the phonological. the higher stratum is the semantic.
- in turn, the semantic stratum (or system) consists of the following metafunctions: the ideational (experimental / logical eg "must", "need", "should", "can", "could", "may", "might", "will", "shall", "would"), the interpersonal (use of pronouns; "just", "whatever", "basically", "slightly", "well", "might", "good", "so", "anyway") and the textual
- examples of the textual metafunction of the semantic stratum in the linguistic system include the ratio of the different kinds of words used to the number of words, vocabulary use, and something called 'register'
- the register of a text, in turn, is the consequence of the interaction of the following three aspects of context / situational semiotic properties:
(a) field: the nature of the social interaction taking place (what is it that the participants are engaged in?);
(b) tenor: the social roles and relationships of the participants;
(c) mode: the channel of communication;
once again, links can be made to my own research work. in fact, Halliday actually said (in 'text as semantic choice in social contexts', 1977) that "it is natural to conceive of text as conversation, for it is in the contexts of everyday interaction that reality is constructed"
- Halliday, in the same article, went on to say that meaners create the environment and transmit it across generations (to which i might add that my work also demonstrates how such creations can be transmitted across space)
Technorati Tags: discourse, education, learning, multiliteracies, RPRPP2005, semiotics
