2 posts tagged “multimodal reading”
Now that I find myself closer to 40 than 30, closer to veteran than novice, I realize that I stand on the far side of a generational divide. When I started teaching, I may have bumped into my students at concerts, or watched the same TV shows. Now, frankly, we inhabit different realities. They text message; I still handwrite notes. They have YouTube dates; I still tape the shows I want to watch on my VCR. Today’s school age generation has been characterized as understanding their American identities more as consumers than citizens (Kress), as living in “a kaleidescope world of representation, where sound image and print are constantly refracted by each other” (Millard, p. 3), as acquiring literacy from the screen rather than the page (Bearne, 2005), as learning to think by “seeing” information rather than reading it (Heath; Freedman), as postmodern producers and self-referential composers, and famously as “digital natives” (Prensky). Here they sit in twenty first century language arts classrooms with teachers who typically privilege word text over visual, aural, kinesthetic or any other kind of text, in a formalist or new critical pedagogy that situates them intellectually in the early twentieth century (Marshall). My learning disposition does not match theirs anymore. In school, I was taught to conform to convention; their functional literacy is about innovation (Kress).
Probably like many teachers, I teach like those educators I most admired as a student 25 years ago. And like many language arts teachers, I love to teach my favorite books from my school years. I struggle with the notion that the way I experience reading, learning, thinking—what I experience as a great text—that these may seem like antiquated notions to young people, or more disturbing, as useless, boring, obsolete. Even my sense of time is quaint compared to theirs. They live in a time of exponential change.
Maybe as I have heard, and must admit have said, during late afternoon office talk, “these kids just don’t like to think,” or “their junior highs didn’t teach them how to write.” However, it could also be true that I didn’t understand how they like to think and compose, what their comfortable and functional semiotic landscape looks like, or how to use it to ground my curriculum.
...this makes
it simply impossible now to expect young people to read in the older
manner, other than as the learning of a specialised form of reading,
where clear reasons are given about that difference, and the purposes
for maintaining it. Where that is not done, the tasks of that learning
are made difficult for many and impossible for some. The screen trains
its readers in certain ways, just as the page had trained its readers
in its ways: the latter had its uses and functions and purposes, which
were the uses and functions and purposes of the society in which it
existed. The new forms have their uses and functions and purposes in
relation to new social, cultural, political and economic demands. It
is not the task of the young to puzzle about and discover that; and it
is not surprising if they treat with incomprehension and disdain that
which makes no sense, and cannot be made sense of for them, by their
parents teachers and others, who can offer only their own
incomprehension, annoyance and outrage.
Gunther Kress, 2003
I read this passage this morning in an article by Gunther Kress. I've been feeling this leeching sensation all day, which I now understand is the lifeblood being sucked out of me by today's realization of the obsolescence of my beloved literacy of the page. I'm old. I have no idea what they teach these youngsters in certification programs anymore. And do I have the energy to help to reinvent the discipline and pedagogy of language arts?
So tonight, I read Josh 3 chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He loved it and wanted to hear more. I felt better, hopeful that I haven't become a reactionary curmudgeon type and that maybe Kress is overstating his case.
