[N]ew communication and information technologies, coupled with the rapid change we’ve experienced as a result of such
development, have generated an emerging digital culture in which traditional notions of text, reading, composition, and
understanding are differently realized. Alongside such changes comes the realization that meaning making in our
contemporary world is not a linear proposition, tied only to an alphabetical literacy, but that it is increasingly multimodal and
interactive. (144)
Because of this, we need a pedagogy of mutliliteracies and multimodalities. This pedagogy:
--- Utilizes ethos as dwelling place. “The ethos of rhetoric [refers] to the way discourse is used to transform space and time into ‘dwelling places’…where people can deliberate about and ‘know together’…some matter of interest” (147). This pedagogy “recogni[zes]…the multimodal ways of meaning making [and] understands the classroom as a collaborative space that seeks to transform the way in which participants dwell and construct their dwelling in their working, personal, and public lives” (148).
--- “adopt[s]…a theory that focuses on invention, is highly contextual, is deeply concerned with the hybridity of cultural and the intertextuality of semiotic or symbolic flows, and is explicitly self-conscious about its own contingencies” (150).
--- “focus[es] on the formative power of public discourse – in particular, five relations that exemplify the way in which texts circulate, the malleability of symbolic resources, and the ways in which technological relations shape the emergence, articulation, circulation, and connectivity of multimodal texts” (151). The five relations are:
- Fragmentation: texts are made of fragmented pieces that can be combined and taken apart again, which allows students to “explor[e] the nature of texts, alphabetic or multimodal, as constructs following particular articulatory logics” (152)
- Articulation: “a process by which different discursive elements or fragments are combined to form a new element that can in turn gain social primacy” (152)
- Circulation: how texts “enter, pass, and travel through a circuit” (153)
- Convergence: “the creation of new transcultural forms [that] strive…toward smooth cultural integration” (154)
- Interface: “The convergence of multiple diverse forms must take place within a zone of terrain that facilitates the transmission and reconciliation of cultural messages.” This place is the interface. The interface is important because “any encoding process shapes the way the message is transmitted, disseminated, and understood” (155).
--- “take[s] into account that such literacy is not about simply understanding but about design as performance”; “literacy [is[ an interpretive performance in the process of meaning making, of cultural production” (157)
--- sees technology not “as the ‘sophisticated manipulation of tools,’ but as a form of social action… [Technology] refers to both the doing and the artistic impetus or creative act of imagination” (148-9)
As an example of how to teach in this fashion, Cordova suggests using storyboarding programs for students to mark out their work.