multimodal and digital literacies                                          

     Student voices can be found here

A teacher can utilize modes that are usually used interdependently (like gesture and spoken language) as two distinct meaning making systems, when such distinction is beneficial for teaching/learning…

(Norris, 2004:129)

Digital technology does not exist without social actors interacting with or through it.  Thus, the use of digital technology always involves interaction - and with or without digital technology - interaction is always multimodal. 

Therefore, to understand digital literacies, we must understand multimodal interaction.

Course Description Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CCT- 531; LING 385)

This course is a theoretical and methodological introduction to Multimodal Discourse Analysis.

How do people actually perform day-to-day interactions and discourse? This course introduces students to the complexity of human communication by studying multiple modes like spoken language, gesture, posture, gaze, layout, and music. The student learns the theoretical background of many different modes; discovers cultural differences in modal performance through ethnographic observation exercises; and learns to use as well as analyze technology in use. 

The student actively uses video cameras and video editing tools to analyze the complex interconnections of multiple modes of communication.

teaching and learning theory                                                

New technologies are beginning to show effects on our uses of language…their specific effects are shaped and directed by the structures and practices of the cultures and societies in which they are produced, or in which they are taken up in particular ways...

Kress (1993:3)

Some thoughts I am currently playing with relate to Vygotsky’s learning theory, dynamic assessment, and multimodality.  I find Vygotsky’s thoughts compelling as far as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is concerned.  Bruner’s ideas on scaffolding are also very useful in teaching and learning.  Also, Lantolf’s thoughts on dynamic assessment, which result from these directions of thought, are of great value.  In reality, however, dynamic assessment usually results in a teacher assessing the student, giving comments and re-assessing the student.  Student assessment is accomplished through traditional classroom and or laboratory test methods based on pen and paper, possibly transferred to new technologies. 

As Lemke points out, theories are only tools and tools become old and have to eventually be repaired or discarded.

Our learning theories are old and in need of repair.  While it would be silly to discard the many good aspects in learning theories, we do have to re-consider their use.  When looking at Vygotsky’s learning theory, for example, I find the notions of a ZPD or ideas on scaffolding and on dynamic assessment still compelling.  However, the question of how to accomplish these notions in today’s world of teaching and learning remains.

When thinking in multimodal and real-world terms regarding teaching and learning, I find much value in semiotics and systemic functional linguistics coupled with my own framework of multimodal interaction.

Using technology in teaching and learning settings brings about the questions of which tools afford what kind of teaching and learning?  All too often, an online program (like Blackboard, which is widely used in the US education system) is based on linear notions of pen and paper and limits new directions of teaching and learning more than it affords them.  While such a program extends teaching beyond the classroom, it forces teachers as well as the students into old notions of what teaching and learning are and how they are to be accomplished.

This is the place where social semiotics comes in:  we need to discover new ways of existing resources and develop new semiotic resources that lend themselves to better our ways of teaching and learning.

informal teaching and learning                                             

…in our experience, learning is an integral part of our everyday lives.  It is part of our participation in our communities and organizations.

(Wenger, 1998: 8)

Learning is accomplished by social actors in many different ways.  Usually, we think of classrooms when speaking of learning.

However, learning is involoved in many informal environments as well:

• social actors learn when taking on a new job or position in a company (institutinalized mission statements, for example, invove changes in attitudes and behaviors);
• social actors learn due to changes in their own ways of life (a mother going back to work after having stayed home with her young children, for example, is learning to become a working mother);
• social actors learn when being socialized into a different community of practice, society, or culture (any movement – physical or mental – across group boundaries involves changes in thought and behavior).

Such learning needs to be viewed in a holistic sense and can be defined as the learning of identities.  When studying learning in its holistic sense, we integrate the multiple contexts that are mediated by interactions (including verbal and nonverbal exchanges and objects and/or visual representations).

intercultural communication                                                 

The subject of "intercultural communication" is beset by a major problem, since there is really very little agreement on what people mean by the idea of culture in the first place. The word "culture" often brings up more problems than it solves...

(Scollon and Scollon, 2001:138)

Course Description Intercultural Communication (CCT-755; LING-496)

People often evoke the concept of culture in order to explain their own and/or others’ actions.  All too often, otherness is produced, re-produced and claimed to be ‘real.’  How ‘real’ are such cultural groupings and what are the consequences in business, education, politics, and our everyday lives

Intercultural Communication is the theoretical study of the discursive production of cultural difference.  This course covers a broad range of readings and has two main objectives: 1. to critique intercultural communication on a theoretical and academic level; and 2. to synthesize the newly gained understanding, allowing students to apply the learned notions in their everyday lives.

copyright: Sigrid Norris 2005