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Multiliteracies

 

              The New London Group first coined the term Multiliteracies in 1996.  “Multiliteracies overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students.” (New London Group, 1996, p. 60) In westernized teaching,  students are taught that the only way to be literate is to be literate in reading and writing.  It does not take into account indigenous ways of being literate about the world around them. For example, my student knows how to travel between the many rivers and lakes that surround our village without using a map.  He understands how to traverse the region, not from reading it from a text, but through practice, observation, and life experience. Learning how to navigate our local landscape is an important skill, and indeed a form of spatial literacy, that he needs in order to be a productive member of our community, to help with fishing and hunting.

 

               I agree with the NLG that it is not enough for teachers to just teach students basic subjects, rather they must also teach them how to be able to members of a global, technological society. “Students need to develop the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives”(New London Group, 1996, p. 66). My project aims to show students that their indigenous knowledge should be valued, and utilized not only outside the classroom but in every facet of their lives.   I wanted students to learn how to critically evaluate the information they received, analyze it, and be able to share with a variety of audiences why the content is important. When students enter the workforce, they are expected to be able to collaborate with peers, to problem solve complex situations, and navigate a technology-saturated world.  My project tries to tackle all of these situations.  My students must work with their groups to complete a variety of tasks: interviewing, building shelters, writing journals, discussing content, and creating digital stories.  My students work on complex situations during the project. For example,  they build a shelter using only tarp, ropes, scissors, whatever they find lying on the ground around the school, and the information they received from the elders.  Students are engaged with technology during this project by using the iPad app Aris for game play and note-taking, writing their journals in Google Docs on the iPad, and creating digital stories using Adobe Voice.  The theory of Multiliteracies reinforces the belief that students need to be able to enter this global community and be productive. This idea is particularly important for my students as they become productive members of our communities with the push for language revitalization. Being multiliterate helps them develop the skills to be ambassadors for their language and their communities.

 

              Digital media is an invaluable resource that students can use to help them become ambassadors for their language. As students become more comfortable with digital media they can use it to create resources that will help with language revitalization efforts, like members of the Hawaiian culture. Galla (2009) explains how technology has helped with Hawaiian language revitalization efforts:

               1) preservation of the Indigenous language; 2) material development and dissemination; 3)                        multiple modes of communication; and 4) achieving relevance, significance and purpose can be                    applied to other Indigenous languages as well (p. 168)

I want to give my students the skills they need so they may use digital media to preserve their language, and show them how their indigenous language is relevant even in a digital age.

Multiliteracies explain that students should be multilingual and have the opportunity to work with different modalities. When students are multilingual they are able to “negotiate discourse differences” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p.3) among the many varieties of language found in Kasigluk. For example, a student speaks Yugtun with Elders, VE with their friends, and SAE in classroom presentations.  In my project, I try to include these multilingual differences. The storyline of the game is presented in SAE, however, the videos and audio of elders is presented in Yugtun.   The students are able to discuss and take notes in Yugtun or in VE.  They then interview elders using Yugtun, but their final journals and digital stories are in SAE with some inclusion of Yugtun.   I wanted my project to show them that each language/dialect has a place and use in our classroom.

 

                Multiliteracies does not only pertain to different linguistic variations: it also relates to students being able to navigate different modalities. Cope and Kalantzis (2009) point out that modalities can be “written language [page and screen], oral language, visual representation, audio representation, tactile representation, and spatial representation”(p. 10).  Each one of these modalities needs students to use a different set of skills to be able to evaluate and understand the information being presented.  For example in my project my students are using oral language to keep notes in the notebook feature of Aris, interviewing elders in Yugtun, and creating digital stories. Students are using visual representation by adding pictures to their digital stories. During the project, students are receiving audio representation through the use of audio clips and videos of elders discussing the various skills presented in the game.  Students are engaged in tactile representation during the game by using the AR interface within the iPad to gather information, and engaging in building their own shelter using tarps and ropes. Lastly, Spatial representation is the ability to understand how objects relate to each other for example when the students work on or build a shelter or adding pictures and text to their digital stories. However, through all of this, students need to be able to understand the information being presented in different modalities.  One of the biggest reasons students should be apt at navigating different modalities is because the world is increasingly becoming more complex.  Dalton(2012) elaborates, “One of the biggest communication changes happening today is the shift from the printed word on a page to multiple modes of image, sound, movement, and text on a screen” ( p. 34).  That is why I try to include so many different modalities into my project.   I want my students to feel comfortable using multiple modalities for a variety of purposes.