TL Under Construction

Still working on my holiday reading of Astley and Bull’s Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies.

Multiliteracies means being cognitively and socially literate with paper, live and electronic texts. It also means being strategic, that is, being able to recognise what is required in a given context, examine what is already known, and then, if necessary, modify that knowledge to develop a strategy that suits the context and situation. (Astley and Bull, 2006, p.23)

Wow! so we need to understand/be understood:

• when writing/reading;
• in speeches, interviews or performances
• using computer/phone.

We need to understand/project the right level of formality/respect for a given situation

• when writing/reading;
• in speeches, interviews or performances
• using computer/phone

This is terribly important in today’s world where you are dealing with such a diverse population. Heck, even excluding diversity, things can go terribly wrong - think how the crew at Chaser’s War on Everything got it so wrong with their skit on terminally-ill children. Somehow the people doing the strategic thinking did not accurately predict the level of disapproval that would be provoked.

Astley and Bull (p.23) point out that every form of text is created with a purpose. In order to be fully literate we need to be aware of that fact and to understand how text is constructed to influence.

So what are the implications for teaching our students? Well first they need to understand about text, all kinds of them. Astley and Bull have compiled common understandings about text from the body of literature about multiliteracies. They are:

• text may be paper, live or electronic
• may be made up of one or more than one sets of signs and symbols (eg. words + emoticons)
• are consciously constructed
• are actively constructed
• may have several possible meanings
• may be built from other texts (or refer to them to have meaning)
• may be multimodal, interactive, linear or non-linear

The authors recommend that any mulitliteracy programs planned need to use these understandings as outcomes for student understanding (Astley and Bull, 2006, p. 24-25).

This got me thinking about how I was taught to ‘read’ various forms of text in my daily life. I wasn’t taught any multiliteracies in school. I had no education in this … or had I?

As children we were read to … a lot and we had wonderful records of stories told by masters like Danny Kaye. Stories told well involve ‘voices’ -tones of voice, colour within those voices to denote children, evil villains, wise old folk. There were levels of sound and patterns of speech repeated in many of the stories. And we heard the stories over and over until we’d learned them off by heart.

We learned to understand/read the language of music when we listened to wonderful recordings like Peter and the Wolf, the Nutcracker Suite and The Carnival of the Animals. Each instrument had a unique voice, each piece told a story.

We watched puppet shows and saw mime artists on TV like the wonderful Marcel Marceau who spoke to us through gesture. The stories were simple, the language was crystal clear.

We were taken to art galleries and our parents talked about the paintings. We watched cartoons like Bugs Bunny with dialogue that held several possible meanings (and British adult comedy full double entendre if we weren’t caught!).

We played with code rings and pictograph messages, we learned about using tracking symbols in Scouts/Guides in case we got lost when hiking.

Interesting how so much of this has disappeared from children’s lives.

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Photo from flickr by phoenixdiaz through the cc licence

This animated video was created by Pete Foley, with sound and music by Chris Perren. The project was co-ordinated by Elliott Bledsoe, from Creative Commons Australia at QUT.

TLs all over the world are most generous. One of the other Teacher Librarians on the OZTL_forum just recently posted a link to this video that explains in a most entertaining way all about Creative Commons and lists some excellent resources that are available through them.

Best of all Creative Commons have a search engine I’d not heard of until I watched this. What a valuable resource for students wishing to create new and exciting works or to enhance projects they’re working on. Be sure to watch the demo video on how this search engine works. And have fun!

Future Lab just emailed their latest newsletter and I’ve been exploring one of their resources called Vision Mapper. This site is an Aladdin’s cave of resources, activities and tools to assist schools (or a school library) to exercise their ‘what if’ skills.

There is so much happening on the educational reform front in Australia that it seems hard to lift our heads from the paperwork at the best of times but when we do get that chance then what? How do we clear our heads to vision forward, what should we focus on? Well this site offers many directions. I’ve been particularly looking from a TLs point of view and thought the Future Day activity could be a powerful one for collaboratively rethinking the school library. It encourages the participants to ‘ build new ideas and identify new practices and resources’ by focussing on current routines then re-imagining routines for an ideal typical day.

Imagine your library staff undertaking this exercise together, thinking though changes and ‘play[ing] out’ decisions to see how they might affect typical days’. The chance to stand back and look at what you’re doing on a really basic level could open up missed opportunities of all kinds - services, resources, environmental aspects.

Vision Mapping offers much to explore and to share with your principal and colleagues, I’ll definitely be bookmarking this site.

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Photo: Visions by Jerry Leandera from flickr

I’ve got my hands on a copy of Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies by Michele Anstey and Geoff Bull. Thankfully it’s a slim volume because I’ve decided to get my head  firmly around multiliteracies before I start on the next two subjects of my M.Ed TL course. There’s just never enough time to absorb everything. Yet working in the little alternative primary school where I am, I recognize there is a gap between the way many of the children gather and use information in their ‘home’ world and how they are working with it in class. I’m betting this is not unusual for most schools, but I want to tackle this by first raising my own awareness.

I’m reassured by the preface of the book that it’s going to first introduce me to the language of the new literacies so I can hang terms on concepts. I’m glad because ‘jargon’ or professional language is not one of my strengths. I may have a very good handle on something but often can’t remember the term for it. Second, I like that it has reflective exercises.  I can write my reflections here for re-reading. Third there are practical examples so you can take theory to practice. And that’s the whole point isn’t it?

Chapter One offers a little history; how literacy in post-war schooling was basically about print — reading, and writing.  Anstey and Bull (2006, p.2) point out that pictures then were mostly decorative. This was certainly the system I was educated in. I don’t remember many illustrations having labelled parts, cross-sections or adding to the context in any real sense. And examining older texts (still weeding these out of the collection) I can imagine as a child being overwhelmed by the dense columns of words, getting to what you hope is an oasis only to find that the illustration has nothing to offer you beyond colour and a break in the page. It certainly seems designed to separate the men from the boys. Either you can read and succeed or you can’t read and you’re a failure. It’s a message, I certainly don’t want to send to my students with their varying levels of ability.  The urgency to weed these old books out has just increased.

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Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing 
     literacies. Kensington Gardens, S.A.: International Reading Association and The Australian
     Literacy Educators’ Association.
Photo: Too much text by seventhsamurai on flickr

I’m  between semesters of study and this is a perfect time to widen my repertoire of Web 2.0 gadgets.

Here are a couple I’ve been ‘playing’ with that seem worth further investigation and use.

Amaztype is a typographic book search. Enter in a keyword and Amazon.com will find and display books on that topic in the shape of your entered keyword. Hover your mouse over the books to view details of them. Click on one to be transported to its entry on Amazon.com. The application seems to keep stacking the books up without end so don’t wait for it to finish. I generated the Seuss photo below taking a print screen once the books filled all the gaps in the letters then opened  and cropped it in my Paint program. (click on the photo, it’ll give you a much clearer look).

I then took it to another great web application Block Poster to blow it up for the wall in our library (I did Seuss across four A4 sheets). The resolution is a bit low but When you stand back, it looks alright.

I haven’t used Block Poster on any high resolution pictures yet but am thinking about giving some photos of students working in the library a go. Photos to follow!