Atlanta, November 2002
Sponsored Session:
NCTE and NA-SFLA
North American Systemic Functional Linguistics Association
http://www.yorku.ca/cummings/nasfla
Issues
How can students be better prepared to respond critically to online texts where authorial responsibility, audience, and message may be diffuse, heterogeneous, distributed, and multimodal?
How do we teach critical literacy for multimedia hypertext webs where meanings are carried in the relationships between, e.g. text and images, rather than in either separately?
How is the nature of critical literacy changed when viewed from an author’s perspective rather than a reader’s perspective? How should we support students as responsible public authors whose work may be read by diverse global audiences?
How do we prepare students to respond intelligently and critically to multimedia texts created across the full range of global social diversity, including the conflicting values of different cultures, genders, sexualities, classes, ages, interest and advocacy groups?
These are the slides from the presentation at the Atlanta conference.
"Metamedia Literacy: Transforming Meanings and Media." In D. Reinking, L. Labbo, M. McKenna, & R. Kiefer (Eds.), Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographic World. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (pp.283-301). 1998.
Lemke, J.L. “Resources for Attitudinal Meaning: Evaluative Orientations in Text Semantics.” Functions of Language 5(1): 33-56. 1998.
"Multimedia
Demands of the Scientific Curriculum". Linguistics and Education 10 (3):
1-25. 2000.
"Multimedia
Genres for Scientific Education and Science Literacy." In M. J. Schleppegrell & C. Colombi, Eds., Developing Advanced Literacy in First
and Second Languages. Erlbaum.
“Travels
in Hypermodality.” Visual Communication 1(3): 299-325. 2002.
Hypertext Semantics -- work in progress
See also links for New Additions, Multimedia Semiotics, and Online
Education from my online office website:
http://www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
Other useful references:
Aarseth , Espen. 1997. Cybertext. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward
Arnold.
Halliday, M.A.K 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd
edition. London: Edward Arnold.
Kolb, David. 1994. Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument,
Philosophy. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems.
Kolb, David. 1997. "Scholarly
hypertext." In Hypertext ’97: Proceedings of the ACM Conferences on
Hypertext. pp. 29-37.
Kress, G.
& van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading
images. London: Routledge.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2001. Multimodal Discourse. London:
Arnold.
Landow, George. 1997. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
van Leeuwen, T. 1999. Speech, Music, Sound. London: Macmillan [New York: St. Martin's Press].
NOTES
Technology is providing new opportunities and challenges to broaden our definition of critical literacy and to help prepare students for effective and responsible participation in global literacy communities.
We need to broaden our definition of critical literacy to include the full spectrum of the communication arts, particularly the kinds of multimedia literacy that are increasingly accessible to all readers and authors through computer-supported online media, including the WorldWideWeb.
We need to construct conceptual frameworks to help students understand how to critically interpret visual media of various kinds and to understand how subtle messages can be conveyed through the combination of verbal text and visual images. We need to understand and help students understand the nature of hypertext media in which authors make different assumptions about the reading paths of prospective readers, and in which readers may exercise their freedom to read across units of texts in new ways, both guided by authors and more independently.
We also need to prepare students to critically interpret the wide range of viewpoints and genres that are produced across the full spectrum of global diversity, as well as the range of social and political diversity within our own society. As a wider and more diverse cross-section of society gains access to authorship rights and easy distribution through online media, students will encounter not only conflicting views within the social mainstream of their own society, but also challenging and in some cases dangerous viewpoints, including those of political extremists and cultists. Commercial media in our society also increasingly target young people with messages not only about consumerism but also incorporating social values which students may need to be aware of and able to effectively critique. Commercial culture and popular culture make use of visual and audio media in conjunction with text in ways that students are often unprepared to analyze critically.
Students themselves are now potential authors whose work may be read by globally diverse audiences. Every webpage a student posts is potentially accessible to readers around the world as well as in their local communities. How can we support students' responsible participation in such local and global literacy communities? What do they need to know in order to create effective multimedia presentations? How should they be prepared to respond to potential criticism of their ideas and work?
Among the tools available to teachers and students today are those which come from research in functional linguistics and studies of the rhetoric of hypertext (see references above). Functional linguistics is a meaning-centered approach to language which sees forms as resources for making meaning and the grammar and semantics of a language as a system of organized choices, to make the meanings we wish to mean. This is particularly true of the Systemic-Functional tradition originating with Michael Halliday. His work has been extended to the analysis of visual resources for meaning in the work of Theo van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress. My own work has tried to look at how verbal text and visual resources combine in multimedia.
One of the key tenets of functional linguistic approaches, in common with rhetorical studies, is that the relationship between form and meaning is a function of multiple contexts: author-reader relationships, situational context and co-text, activity type, institutions, genres, registers, and culture. Moreover, our use of language and other semiotic resources (e.g. van Leeuwen has also analyzed audio resources, including music) not only depend on prior contexts, but they create and alter the context, on various timescales (more quickly for situations, more slowly for enduring relationships, social organization, culture). We need to teach students to be aware of the ways in which the institution of the school influences school-literacy genres, and how its values and agendas may limit as well as support their own literacies.
Increasingly students today are inclined to live and to imagine their lives across the boundaries of institutions. Our approach to critical communicative literacy needs to pay more attention to how they build bridges between their learning and literacy practices in school and their practices outside the school: at home, among peers, and in their participation in popular culture, mass media culture, and youth culture.
Jay L. Lemke
November 2002