Pathways to multiliteracies: student teachers' critical reflections on a multimodal text.

Introduction

In recent years, Australian educators have engaged in important dialogue about the need for students in schools to develop broad repertoires of literacy practice (ACDE, 2001; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Luke, 2000, 2003; Luke & Freebody, 1999; The Victorian Essential Learning Standards, 2005). Likewise, educators have aimed to develop pedagogic approaches that account for how contemporary, multimodal texts combine visual, spoken, audio and non-verbal forms of expression (Beavis, 2002; The New London Group, 2000; Kalantzis and Cope, 2001; Kress, 1997; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Luke, 2002; Unsworth, 2001). Such efforts are captured in Luke and Carpenter's (2003 p. 20) insistence that students require a 'tool kit' for 'analysing, critiquing and engaging with the global "flows" of image, representation and text' that they encounter on a daily basis.

Notwithstanding these intentions and motivations, some educators point to a potential dissonance between the kinds of literacy practices traditionally valued by society and schools and the textual universes that young students inhabit in their lives outside of school (see for example, Knobel, 1999; Lankshear, Snyder & Green, 2000; Luke & Luke, 2001). Consequently, the task of encouraging both student teachers and experienced teachers to explore contemporary texts that they themselves might not necessarily read, or to teach literacy practices around multimodal texts that they might not equate with reading, becomes problematic. This is especially so when some student teachers continue to define literacy in terms of foundational skills alone because they have not witnessed the use of multimodal texts for instructional purposes during school practicum placements.

To address these issues, final year Bachelor of Education, Primary students [approximately 100] at The University of Melbourne complete a compulsory subject that focuses on critical approaches to analysing, critiquing and designing multimodal texts such as animations, websites, and CD ROMs. Through their engagement with such texts as adult readers, it is anticipated that the student teachers learn how the multiple elements of contemporary texts combine to create meaning. In turn, it is anticipated that they bring this informed understanding to their teaching of multimodal texts to young learners in primary schools, and thus contribute to the design of comprehensive literacy curriculum in their future schools.

The student teachers are introduced to a range of theoretical and conceptual frameworks that allow them to achieve these aims. They analyse how the various visual, aural and linguistic elements of a multimodal text such as pathways (ACMI) create meaning (Kalantzis & Cope; 2001; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001), and are encouraged to reflect on their personal readings of this text. They analyse the design and aesthetics of popular culture texts for children (Misson, 1999), such as The Lego website, Manga-inspired animations and the covers of Total Girl magazine, to understand the role of context in understanding these texts. They are also required to apply critical literacy approaches to these texts using accessible frameworks developed for use with students in the primary classroom (for example, Callow, 1999; Knobel & Healy, 1999; Luke, Comber & O'Brien, 1996; O'Brien, 1999). Finally, the student teachers are required to design a poster / oral presentation that demonstrates how they, in turn, would scaffold their own students' understandings of how a multimodal text is constructed, the meanings that are embodied in such a text and the cultural knowledge a reader might bring to the text, or need in order to read the text. This final task aims to place student teachers in the role of text creator, with the capacity to transform their understanding of multimodal texts into the design of pedagogic possibilities that support first and second language learners in primary classrooms (Kalantzis & Cope, 2001). Particular emphasis here is given to the teacher's role in scaffolding language/culture for ESL learners as a means of providing access to the powerful ideologies of popular culture texts (see Duff, 2002).

The main sources of data for this paper are the assessment tasks that three students--Melissa, Adam and John--completed for the subject. These students opted to use the pathways text for all three assessment tasks, and so I approached them for an interview-conversation (September 17, 2003) to find out more about their continued engagement with a text that challenged them on various levels, and yet opened up new possibilities for them as readers and as teachers. For these student teachers pathways represented a problem to be solved; an aesthetic to appreciate; a cultural/political issue to understand. This was seen as significant in that not all of their fellow student teachers related to pathways in a positive sense, and varied in their willingness to look for the meaning in a multimodal exhibition that privileged non-linearity, metaphor, and symbol. Notably, pathways was not readily accessible to the majority of the students (see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), and this could be attributed to the 'high art' genre of the exhibition that contrasts with other forms of popular multimodal texts such as computer games, music videos and internet sites with which the students are more familiar. It appeared that the intricate relationship between multiple meanings, multimodality and genre in pathways tested many student teachers' meaning-making resources and their cultural and linguistic empathies. Although this initial confusion dissipated for many, the linguistic barriers established through the text continued to frustrate some. In …