Making sense of the multimodal, multimedia literacy landscape?

In the last issue of Literacy, Carey Bazalgette andDavid Buckingham argued that issues of multimodalityhave been oversimplified, recruited to official frame-works, and sidelined Media Studies (Bazalgette andBuckingham, 2013). In this issue, a number of articlesagain engage with theories of multimodality to help usexplore different types of text.

As tablet computers become increasingly common inhomes and classrooms, we need ways of thinkingabout children’s meaning-making on and around theseportable touch-sensitive screens. The first two articlesin this issue make a valuable contribution to thisemerging area of research. Natalia Kucirkova, DavidMesser, Kieron Sheehy and Rosie Flewitt use multi-modal interaction analysis to investigate how a childand her mother interacted with and around a multi-media personalised story-sharing app on an iPad.They note how gesture, movement, touch, talk andfacial expression signal the ‘intimate and happy’ natureof the interaction, linking this to the personalised contentalong with the embodied physical connection betweenadult, child and iPad as they came together in a “sharedstory space”.

Alyson Simpson, Maureen Walsh and Jennifer Rowsellfocus on classroom interactions with an iPad in primaryand secondary schools in Canada, the United States andAustralia. The methods they used to record and analysethese interactions will be of particular use to researchersand practitioners seeking ways to capture the processesthrough which children read on tablet computers. Theydescribe children’s multimodal, multidirectional ‘readingpaths’, highlighting how children work across andbetween screens. Their findings are provisional but offera valuable contribution to our growing understanding ofhow the materiality of the iPad and haptics matter to theprocess of reading texts on tablet computers.

Although these first two articles explore ways ofanalysing the processes involved in meaning-makingaround new technologies and multimedia texts, AlisonArrow and Brian Finch remind us that there is much tobe done in implementing literacy curricula andpedagogies which adequately reflect contemporarycommunicative landscapes. Their survey of multi-media literacy practices amongst children, parentsand teachers in New Zealand highlights a persistentdivide between planned school and home literacypractices. In the past, this was often explained as amismatch between the literacy experiences of teachersand their pupils. However, Arrow and Finch suggestthat the difficulty is not the teachers’ lack of experiencein digital environments but that they may be insuffi-ciently aware of children’s home practices and do not

see the relevance of their personal digital experiencefor literacy pedagogy and curriculum.

Richard Berger and Julian McDougall address thisdisconnect between school curriculum and digitalmedia through their article based on a project givingsecondary students the opportunity to study thevideogame L. A. Noire as part of their English Litera-ture A-level syllabus. Students blogged about thegame, taught it to their teachers and produced ‘studymaterials’. Berger and McDougall highlight how thework not only disrupted more traditional approachesto what counts in the English curriculum but alsodisrupted individuals’ usual positions as teachers andlearners as they read the game together. Berger andMcDougall describe different discourses that emergedas teachers and students discussed how they negoti-ated the reading of games as ‘authorless’ literature.The work helps us to revisit issues of legitimacy andworth in the English curriculum and perhaps invitesus, as literacy scholars, to engage with games. Takingthis work alongside that of Arrow and Finch, perhapswe should see video games as much a part of theliteracy landscape as written stories and poetry. Videogames are an important part of many students’ homeliteracy repertoires, and we need to acknowledge anddevelop their skills and knowledge, as well as our own.

The last two articles focus on interactions with textsand contribute in very different ways to debates aboutthe teaching of reading comprehension. Definingcomprehension as the “dialogic transaction of makingmeaning from text”, Fiona Maine provides us withdetailed analyses of children’s interactions with apicture book and an image as they read together in pairs.She highlights how, as children talked around textstogether, they played with meanings and connectedwhat they saw to their own experience. In the lastissue, Janet Maybin (Maybin, 2013) argued that emo-tional commitment drives children’s engagement withtexts, and we see this in Maine’s article too, as thechildren’s responses seemed to be deepened as theyengaged emotionally with the texts and with each other.

Our final article, from Lynn Shanahan and Lisa Roof,derives from a study of reading strategy instruction.Descriptions of effective teaching are commonlydescribed in terms of teacher/pupil talk, and a seriesof seminal studies have encouraged teachers andteacher educators to see pupil/teacher talk as central tolearning. Although Shanahan and Roof’s conclusionsare tentative, they raise important points about the needto examine gesture in teacher/pupil interaction andprompt us to reflect on teachers’ use of gesture and its re-lationship to different teaching styles. Their article can,

Editorial

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Literacy Volume 47 Number 3 November 2013 113Literacy

perhaps usefully, be read in conjunction with RobertaTaylor’s work on multimodal analysis of children’s inter-actions, published previously in Literacy (Taylor, 2012).

Together, these articles demonstrate a diversity ofways in which different modes – movement, images,gesture, posture, proxemics, haptics and words – areimbricated in our dialogues with texts and highlightthe significance of artefacts, bodies and relationshipsto meaning-making. Such perspectives help us arriveat complex understandings of children’s meaning-making, which challenge narrow frameworks forstructuring the teaching and assessment of literacy.

Cathy BurnettJulia Davies

ReferencesBAZALGETTE, C. and BUCKINGHAM, D. (2013) Literacy, media

and multimodality: a critical response. Literacy, 47.2, pp.95–102.

MAYBIN, J. (2013) What counts as reading? PIRLS, EastEnders andThe Man on the Flying Trapeze. Literacy, 47.2, pp. 59–66.

TAYLOR, R. (2012) Messing about with metaphor: multimodalaspects to children’s creative meaning making. Literacy, 46.3, pp.156–166.

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