Changing Literacies for Changing Times

An Historical Perspective on the Future of Reading Research, Public Policy, and Classroom Practices

James V. Hoffman, Yetta M. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135845759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Offering the wisdom that only experience and expertise in the field can bring, this book takes a critical look into the present and the future of literacy as envisioned by leading reading researchers. The lead author of each chapter, and in some cases more than one, of the authors, is a distinguished reading researcher elected by their peers into the Reading Hall of Fame. In this book these distinguished literacy leaders extend their role as researchers to speak directly to issues of practice and policy.

All chapters address the theme of literacy and the teaching of literacy as being in a constant state of change. The authors are theoretical as they describe literacy, literacy acquisition, and the teaching of literacy; they are practical as they examine the issues that classroom teachers and reading specialists engage with on a daily basis; and they are political as they advocate for informed policy at the local, state and national levels. A key message in this book is that literacy professionals must take an active role to shape change.

Part I
Expanding Views of Literacy

Chapter 1
The Communicative, Visual, and Performative Arts

Core Components of Literacy Education

Diane Lapp and James Flood
San Diego State University

Shirley Brice Heath
Brown University and Stanford University

Judith Langer
State University of New York at Albany

Recognition of the communicative, visual, and performing arts as integral components of literacy instruction is rich in its history and evocative of a new phenomenon that is radically changing literacy education. The long, full history includes the uses of technologies such as radio, television, films and videos (Baines, 1997; Trier, 2008); the use of illustrations and graphics in texts (Lapp, Flood, Brock, and Fisher, 2007); the use of trade books that often work equally well as reading materials and pieces of art (Kiefer, 1997); and Amazon’s new reading machine, Kindle, which changes the way we can store and read print materials. We should add to these material forms of technology the longstanding complements to the written word of drama, dance, and instrumental music. All these both evoke powerful tales of their own but also deepen and extend meanings of written texts as well as notational systems, such as that used for music and choreography (Heathcote, 1980; Heathcote and Bolton, 1995; Wagner, 1999). Important, too, are the growing and widespread uses of multimedia and mixed media in music and the performing arts as well as in other aspects of life, work, and play.

Much confusion has arisen over terms such as multiliteracies, visual literacies, and the like, and when definitions accompany these terms, the arts—visual, communicative, and performative—rarely figure significantly. Though we make no claim to an absolute definition, our perspective is that literacies involve all media forms that combine iconic images, symbol systems, and conventions of presentation. Western societies have, since the Middle Ages, generally allowed for all of these identifications of the author (whether single individual or collaborative company).

Critical in the history of visual literacies/arts has been their retrievability—i.e., they have some kind of permanent or quasi-permanent form. This kind of broad definition covers visual literacies/arts back to Stone Age narrative paintings through illuminated manuscripts to contemporary print matter, films, and many kinds of exhibitions. Communicative arts refers to those forms that generate meaning through their primary reliance on oral language, alive or recorded in audio or visual transmission (as in the case of sign language representation). Also dependent on the communicative arts are print representations of language usually (though not always) associated with paper.

The performing arts rely largely on the human body or its extension (cf. puppetry) as a means to convey meaning through both communicative and visual arts (through costume, etc.). Such art forms may be visually recorded (and have long been rendered in paintings or for well over a century in photographs as well). Yet, the performing arts are generally not fully retrievable. Live dance, musical, and dramatic performances always carry a one-time-only quality. Even though the same play or dance is performed again and again, each performance (and script, if one is present), will become the unique presentation of the individual, group, or company performing. Technology has entered the visual, dramatic, musical, and performative arts to complement, reproduce, and supplement each of these individually and in new combinations.

In this chapter we focus on the past few years where visual, communicative, and performing arts have rapidly become core components and essential companions of print literacy. As Goodman and Hoffman, the editors of this volume, suggest in their introduction, we attempt to stretch your definition of what counts as literacy. As yet, little recognition and response to the arts within the print medium have influenced behaviors or values surrounding formal schooling. This statement stands out especially when we compare the role of the arts in schools with their centrality in the worlds of medicine, commerce, recreation, and, indeed, most occupations. Teacher education and preparation as school teachers have always relied firmly on the idea of teaching and of formal instruction within specified times and places by authorized agents. In sharp contrast, both historically and in today’s world, learning in the arts goes on before, within, and well beyond (and sometimes largely without) formal instruction.

Few ever speak of pedagogy as established or fixed in the arts. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, studios or schools that produced dozens of “original” Rembrandt paintings were viewed not as factories of sameness, but as climates supporting particular styles of production and generative of innovative works as well. In today’s world, the idiosyncratic teaching and creative styles of arts directors, choreographers, or drama directors often find their way to center place in critical reviews as well as within the marketplace of competition for the work of certain artists.

In the first volume of the Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy through the Visual and Communicative Arts (hereafter HRTLVC, 1997), Flood, Heath, and Lapp urged educators to consider an expanded view of literacy that would embrace changes in literacy certain to increase rapidly with advances in electronic and digital technologies and graphic design. The HRTLVC, in a host of ways and through the voices of authors and artists, readers, and writers, pointed out how advances in the arts were sure to continue to convey, complement, and sometimes supplant printed texts. The volume predicted that most print forms would decline in significance, and most would increasingly incorporate the graphic arts, iconic representations, and abbreviated language. The HRTLVC 1997 plea to educators was for openness to the kinds of learning desperately needed and sure to be embraced by the young whose lives were already largely shaped by the information economy. By 2005, young television viewers turned less and less to sitcoms, films, and dramas produced by strangers. Instead they created their own, blending fact, fiction, mystical, and fantasy. They looked to comedians and talk-show hosts as their new sources. Certain to come were paper-free and nearly print-free representations of information and persuasion within the worlds of commerce, medicine, and entertainment. Instructors in formal education settings would surely have to do much more than simply think about a few clever ways to insert electronically transmitted representations in their classrooms as mere add-ons for “ordinary” print materials.

Prescient as these points may seem from today’s backward glance over the past decade, no amount of foresight in 1997 could have fully predicted the pace or direction of the radical, swirling changes of what would come within only a few years. These changes have manifested themselves as innovations, disappearances, reappearances, mutations, and innovations.

Disappearances, Comebacks, and Innovations

Video reigned throughout the 1990s; by 2010, its extinction may very well be complete. High definition DVD (HDDVD) is disappearing. Newspapers, which have long linked visual representations to print, face rapidly dwindling circulation rates throughout the world. The Internet offers minute-by-minute updates of world events, and newspapers scramble to morph into new functions and forms.

On the other hand, comic books, near extinction by the end of the 1990s, made a quick comeback no more than a decade later. Graphic novels, seemingly a heftier version of comics, jumped into prominence, and both media forms stepped to the forefront in innovative designs, strong character development, and narratives with “legs.” In 2007 The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, a thick, sober-looking volume ostensibly for pre-adolescent readers of children’s literature, combined text and large bold visual images. The work earned the Caldecott Award for picture books, perhaps suggesting a move toward honoring images rather than words. Consumers of both graphic novels and comic books generate network forms, such as blogs, zines, and chatrooms, replacing traditional print reviews and critiques. Both comic books and graphic novels bear close kinship with film animation designs and innovative trends in storylines.

Also pushing hard on any narrow conception of either literacy or literacies have been other advances in interpretive forms of play or games. After less than a decade of prominence, hand-held video games almost entirely gave way to online games. Telephones quickly accelerated possibilities for linking verbal and visual communication, recording photographic images, giving immediate Internet access, and storing data for later transfer to computers.

As the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century approaches, visual images serve as primary introductions to products, organizations, and candidates. In the world of food and restaurants, images including flowers, prints, pictures, and ice sculptures have replaced menus as the first encounter with consumers. Museums use multimedia kaleidoscopic productions to lure patrons into viewing collections. Installation art, street performance, and interactive art make aesthetic traditions framed or fixed in form or space seem outdated. Exhibition and performance continue to merge; artists and reviewers, producers and engineers now seem inseparable.

As electronic and digital technologies continue to expand, traditional processes, agents, and materials of formal schooling no longer figure as the primary transmitting site of learning. Every occupation in contemporary society demands continual learning to handle ever-changing requirements in skills, information, and ability to interpret regulations and directives. Taxi cab drivers, stock clerks, and factory workers need to keep up with recent software required in their workplaces. Many professional service jobs (e.g. health workers, hygienists, physical therapists, bank tellers, and fiber optic technicians) stay current through workshops supported by manuals filled with elaborate illustrations and accompanied with interactive DVDs. In the health field, patients learn about drug procedures and medical routines through these same technologies with accompanying written materials that often seem optional or supplementary at best. All professions from law to medicine to health care are bombarded with new areas of specialization inextricably tied to visual and performative arts.

For example, as the legal field of intellectual property expands, key documentation in patent requests and specifications, as well as high-tech applications, comes in visual and interactive forms through digital means. Every field depends on an array of visual literacies. Consumers of all goods, products, and services have to respond to marketing in which visual displays and even interactive DVDs of the product do the selling. In fact, the demand for more visuals to replace the written word is illustrated by the significant increase in the production of instructional DVDs for a wide array of products and services (e.g. refrigerators, ovens, tools, or window upgrades).

Roles beyond K–16 Schooling

Only those beyond their early twenties would speak of any of the above as changes; these phenomena are the expected or normal way to know or go (Prensky, 2001, 2005). Consider, for example, how rare it is in many communities for anyone under 30 years of age to look up a number in a telephone book; instead the choice is to go to the Internet or call a friend. (For more on the normalcy of technology in seeking, confirming, communicating, and representing, see Hobbs, 1997, 1998; Moje, 2007; Semali, 2000, 2003). A favorite form of entertainment for young people comes in visits to specialty stores filled with new technologies. There highly specialized young salespeople, many of whom have had little or no advanced education, engage the young visitors in animated conversations in which they exchange knowledge and predict the success or failure of specific products or means of communication (Goodson and Norton-Meier, 2003). The knowledge of the young emanates from their fascination with technology and is honed through experience gained from observations and conversations with friends who have similar interests.

Icons such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Steven Jobs all grew up with a fascination for visual technology. All shared their interests with their friends during their teen years and into their twenties when they began to convert their hobbies, inventions, artistic creations, and business leadership into business organizations. From their own experiences, based in neither higher education nor extensive dependence on print media, leaders such as these used their own learning lives as models for hiring their employees. Apple, Google, and many other new companies depend on selecting employees who are creative, experienced, self-directed learners who willingly experiment and work in teams. In the high-tech world, features such as flexibility, risk-taking, and “wild dreaming” are seen as critical to staying ahead of competitors.

Visual, experiential, and interactional means of learning have taken primacy in the lives of most young people in post-industrial societies (Heath, 2004b; Luke and Elkins, 1998). Their lear...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contributors
• PART I Expanding Views of Literacy
• PART II Literacy Development
• PART III Foundational Issues in the Teaching of Reading
• PART IV Teaching, Teacher Education, and Professional Development
• PART V Policy and Practice in Literacy Education