This multimodality/multiliteracy is not only but reading and writing (in the traditional sense), but should also include all cultural forms. These cultural forms include texts like sculpture and paintings, but also sites like “theme parks and department stores, tourist sites and food outlets, music videos and the Internet” (262). He also argues, “In…all…multimodal sites, meaning lies within what we make of the space between discrete communicative systems” (257), and he states that “one does not read the language and then the pictures and then listen to the sounds; rather, one takes them in as a gestalt, a whole, all at once” (259).
Duncum offers two potential curriculums:
- “Media education…focuses largely on the interaction of spoken and written text and images, though it also deals with music and sound effects. It primarily focuses upon print media, mostly advertising, film and television” (259). In this curriculum, students view multimodal texts repeatedly and analyze different features of the texts; then, students take what they learned to create their own multimodal texts.
- “Multiliteracy education has been frequently concerned with the relationship between written words and images…picture books” (260). Teachers may also have students analyzes books with different amounts of words and images and analyze how the varying amounts affect meaning.
Key Terms
- Multiliteracy: “the post-structuralist insight that any cultural site, of any kind, can be understood according to multiple readings generated from the multiple positions from which one views, reads, or hears”; “the making of meaning through the interaction of different communicative modes” (253).
- Multimodality: “all cultural sites, but especially ones like television and the Internet, include a range of modalities, especially language, images and sound” (253).
- Literacy: “the making of meaning with communicative modes” (253). “Instead of being located solely in the head, it is understood to be located in social settings, and, like images, instead of being located in texts themselves, it is understood to be located in contexts…Literacy is seen as dynamic. It is seen to change over time in response to changing applications of technology and social preoccupations, and, like visual imagery, to be profoundly political in the sense that it is used at every level with the intent to define and control the direction of events” (255).