Literacy and Multimodality Across Global Sites

Maureen Kendrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415859790
• eBook ISBN: 9781135132446
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapid growth of international research in this area, accounts of a broader range of global sites, particularly economically under-resourced and culturally diverse contexts such as Sub-Saharan Africa, remain under-researched and under-represented in the literature. This book contextualizes a range of literacies including health literacies, community literacies, family literacies, and multilingual literacies within broader modes of communication, most specifically play and the visual. The claim is that powerful pedagogies, methodologies and theories can be constructed by taking a more detailed look at multimodal meaning-making in diverse contexts. By describing and analyzing multimodal practices and texts across a diverse range of contexts, the book highlights different constructs, issues and emerging questions dealing with the study of literacies and multimodality.

1
“Thinking Like a Child”

Synaesthesia, Multimodality, and Multilingualism

In this chapter, I explore how a young child reconfigures her bilingual knowledge of written language when she moves it across modes during play. I consider what we can learn about young children’s meaning-making in general and their multilingual literacy in particular by taking an up-close look at the process of synaesthesia as it takes place during play. I begin by examining some of the ideas associated with synaesthesia in the context of children’s multimodal meaning-making.

Synaesthesia and Multimodality

My focus on the intersection of multilingualism and multimodality in young children’s meaning-making is informed by the New London Group’s (1996) “Pedagogies of Multiliteracies” manifesto and Kress’s (1997, 2000, 2003) seminal work on multimodality. The New London Group (1996) coined the term “multiliteracies” to expand “traditional” notions of literacy and to highlight two aspects of the complexity of texts in the contemporary communicative landscape: (1) the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity in a globalized society and (2) the variety of text forms, including those associated with multimodal ways of meaning-making and information technologies.

Multiliteracies scholars have written widely about the changing processes and materialities of text production and interpretation in 21st-century literacy practices (Malinowski, 2014), emphasizing that in any communicative event, language, whether written or spoken, is only partial to the meaning-making process (see, e.g., Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). As Kress and Jewitt (2003) argue, any given communicative event involves simultaneous modes whereby meaning is realized in different ways by different modes. This multimodal perspective views children as sign-makers who make use of the resources available to them in their specific sociocultural environment. When children engage in meaning-making, they use signs (e.g., language, images, gestures, actions, and objects) to communicate simultaneously the here and now of a social context while representing the resources they have “to hand” from the world around them (Kress, 1997). The sign’s intrinsic meanings are not arbitrary but, rather, represent what is central to the sign-maker at that particular moment (Kress & Jewitt, 2003). The meanings also reflect reality as imagined by the sign-maker and are influenced by his or her beliefs, values, and biases. Whereas much has been written about the multiliteracies manifesto in terms of the changing landscape of communication, much less is known about how learners “play with” different sign systems or modes and the “interplay between and across modes,” including how one builds on another and how this affords new identities of empowerment in language learning (Kendrick, Early & Chemjor, 2013, p. 397; see also, Early & Marshall, 2008).

A construct central to understanding the interplay between and across sign systems and modes is “synaesthesia,” which occurs when one mode invokes another (see, e.g., Kress, 1997). I use Einstein, who attributed his intellectual and creative ability to being able to “think like a child,” as an illustrative example of this construct. What does it mean to “think like a child”? In a 2007 article in Time Magazine, “It’s All Relative: 20 Things You Need to Know About Einstein,” Walter Isaacson notes how Einstein’s “great breakthroughs came from visual experiments performed in his head rather than the lab. They were called Gedankenexperiment—thought experiments” (p. 4). As a 16-year-old, Einstein imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam wondering what would happen to light waves if you reached the speed of light. Would it seem as if they were stationary? He pictured lightning striking at both ends of a moving train. Knowing that math was the language used to describe such wonders, he visualized how equations were reflected in realities. For a decade, he grappled with such thought experiments, the result of which was his theory of relativity. These thought experiments involved moving between and across thinking mathematically, in numbers and symbols, to thinking in pictures, in the visual.

Einstein’s ability to “think like a child” required a blending of senses, a translation across modes and systems. This is synaesthesia. It occurs when one mode instigates another, in this case, the visual invoking the mathematical. What is also important to recognize in this example is that cognition has taken place in modes other than language. Kress (1997) insists that we need to uncouple the assumed link between language and cognition and to instead adopt the proposition that cognition is accomplished in all modes. Further, we need to understand cognition and imagination as the same kind of mental activity. Cognition is dependent on the existence of articulations of units and their relations in a particular medium; imagination, in comparison, is dependent on activity moving across media and modes, always going beyond the boundaries set by convention in a particular mode (e.g., poetry extends the boundaries of the linguistic by crossing into sensory modes such as the visual and auditory). Like cognition, imagination operates in all modes. It follows then that meanings also are realized differently in different modes, making it possible to construct analogous meanings in sign systems differing from the mode in which the meaning originally was encoded (Early & Marshall, 2008). Arguably, this inter-semiotic, ideational meaning-making has generative potential for different cognitive and imaginative engagement. Similarly, Lemke has remarked, “Meanings in multimedia are not fixed and additive (the word-meaning plus the picture-meaning), but multiplicative (word-meaning modified by image-context, image-meaning modified by textual context), making a whole far greater than the simple sum of its parts” (1998, p. 312).

Different modes give rise to different thinking—we constantly translate from one medium to another. According to Kress (1997), this ability, and this fact of synaesthesia, is essential for humans to understand the world. He argues that this activity, this constant work of translation and transduction, is much more strongly present for some than for others, and “seemingly more strongly present for children than for adults” (p. 39). Children’s approach to learning is entirely synaesthetic: “Things are always more than one thing, and have different logics, different uses, depending on where you stand when you are looking” (p. 139).

In school, the use of written language typically is fostered over all other modes of expression, particularly as children get older. Yet, as illustrated previously, written language enables only one form of cognition, drawing enables another, and sound and movement enable yet others. Kress’s argument is that we need to foster this synaesthetic ability in children’s learning rather than suppress it. In other words, we need to allow children to think like children. Children have natural synaesthetic abilities. Rather than building on and extending these, traditional school-based literacy fails to “recognize or adequately use the meaning and learning potentials inherent in synaesthesia” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 179). Instead, it tries to corral and confine itself as though written language could operate in isolation from all other modes.

In contrast, play is a system of communication in which many media or modes are used simultaneously, with little or no restraint, and where cognition and imagination merge to become the same kind of activity. In other words, it allows children to naturally engage in synaesthetic learning and discovery. It is a space where children are the “makers and not merely the users of systems of communication” and where they can easily foreground the mode that “feels right” or that is best suited for their purposes (Kress, 1997, p. 163). But even in instances where one mode is favoured, in the brain, there is a continual translation and transduction between and across different modes, even if not outwardly visible (Kress, 1997). This is perhaps why companies like Google and 3M have devised dynamic workspaces complete with toys, slides, and video games that encourage employees to embrace their “inner child” and (re)engage in play. By encouraging adults to relearn how to think like children, these workplaces are intended to stimulate imagination, creativity, and innovation.

In this chapter, I make a case for situating multimodality in general and synaesthesia in particular more centrally within understandings of how young children make sense of multiple languages. In the next section, I introduce Leticia,¹ the focal child in this exploration of multilingual literacy learning, play, and synaesthetic meaning-making.

Leticia at Home and at School

When I first met Leticia, she was growing up in a multilingual, multiliterate household in an inner-city area of a western Canadian city. Her parents, Howard and Linda Tsiu, were refugees from Vietnam and arrived in Canada as youth during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As parents, they placed a high value on education, and Linda took advantage of programmes and other educational opportunities for parents and children in her community. In fact, I first met Linda when she was participating in a family literacy programme with her six-month-old son, Richmond. Leticia also attended a community English Headstart programme when she was three years old.

Both Howard and Linda spoke Vietnamese, along with English and Chao Chiu, their first language. Both parents also had facility with Cantonese and Mandarin, though to differing degrees. Most often, the family spoke to each other in Chao Chiu and English. Chao Chiu, however, was not typically the language of Leticia’s play at home. Instead, she used English with her playmates, who were predominantly her cousins (Ryan and Lily). Wilson, the Tsiu’s eldest child, and Leticia were both enrolled in a Mandarin-English bilingual programme at Greencourt Elementary School, a public school 20 minutes by car from the Tsiu’s home. Although there were several other public schools in the Tsiu’s inner-city neighbourhood, Greencourt was the closest one with a Chinese bilingual programme. The school had a population of approximately 300 students, 40 percent of whom were of Chinese or Vietnamese heritage. At the time of the study, Leticia was enrolled in kindergarten and her brother Wilson was in second grade.

To Howard and Linda, school was serious business, and they expected their children to succeed. They wanted them to learn English in particular, but Chinese as well, because of its importance to their culture. During her kindergarten year, it was expected that Leticia would start reading and writing in both languages. Like most parents, Howard and Linda wanted their children to have opportunities in life. Leticia talked about wanting to be a teacher when she grew up, and her aspirations were encouraged strongly by her parents, who wanted her to develop good work habits and to make high achievements early in her schooling. By December of Leticia’s kindergarten year, it was their hope that she would already be reading. Leticia was keenly aware of her parents’ expectations and tried in her own way to garner their approval.

Linda also had a number of other expectations for her daughter’s language and literacy learning. One of her primary concerns involved English and Chinese writing. She often would write sentences and request that Leticia sit at the kitchen table and copy them. In one scribbler, for example, English sentences such as “I am a girl” and “I go to the mall” were written by Linda and sporadically—with a tentative hand—copied by Leticia. Chinese characters were particularly difficult for Leticia, and Linda often reproached her for not being able to write her Chinese name correctly. Over time, considerable tension appeared to develop around reading and writing, reaching a point where Leticia regularly refused to work with her mother. Midway through the kindergarten year, Linda became so concerned with her daughter’s education that she enrolled her in a subsidized Montessori school for two afternoons per week. This new arrangement meant that Leticia attended kindergarten for five mornings and Montessori school for two afternoons a week. In time, the kindergarten teacher began to complain that Leticia was having difficulties concentrating and focusing at school.

At school, Leticia also made pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “Thinking Like a Child”: Synaesthesia, Multimodality, and Multilingualism
• 2 Imaginative Play, Multimodal Meaning-Making, and Literate Identities
• 3 Drawings as an Alternative Way of Understanding Young Children’s Constructions of Literacy with Roberta McKay
• 4 The Affordances and Challenges of Visual Methodologies in Literacy Studies
• 5 “Taking It Personally”: Advenience as Reflexivity in Multimodal Research
• 6 Final Thoughts and Perspective
• Index