We’re on a road to
nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that trip to
nowhere
We’ll take that ride
I’m feeling okay this
morning
And you know
We’re on the road to
paradise
Here we go, here we go
David Byrne, Talking
Heads, Road to Nowhere, 1985
Media
Literacy
Media literacy matters,
just ask Nadia Konyk as she tried to get her mother to understand why she
preferred reading and exploring literature on line (Motoko, p. 1). The problem is that, Nadia’s mom and many
others today (i.e. parents, teachers, not for profit organizations, Department
of Education, and librarians to name a few) are trying to come to an
understanding of, why digital? Isn’t
picking up a book better because that’s traditional? The Media Literacy Project
https://medialiteracyproject.org/learn/media-literacy/ , which closed last
year after 22 years, states that “for centuries, literacy has referred to the ability
to read and write. Today, we get most of our information through an interwoven
system of media.” Given that we are
learning through various forms of media, and not just books, there is a need to
be media literate.
Media literacy (Oldakowski,
2014) is based on “the interwoven system of media (which) is called
multimodality, and is meaning that is made through multiple representations and
communication systems (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) which allows individuals
to use more than one mode to express understanding” (p. 70). In my work with poor parents that are often
disabled and marginalized from the wider community, I have watched them growing
into persons that are using media and multimodal approaches to gain support and
develop a sense of literacy that they were previously locked out of. They had been “locked out” because they
didn’t see themselves as able to participate meaningfully in the web literacy
of Web 1.0 that was largely based on traditional literacy methods. Additionally, the expense of a computer and access
to the internet presented more obstacles.
Today, with smartphones, face book and other apps, as well as free
Wi-Fi, the internet frontier is opening its doors to underprivileged people and
they have found a place for their voice and to share experience.
The New
Media Landscape (how has literacy changed)
The new landscape of
media literacy is being strongly influenced by multimodality. Multimodality in literacy (learning) has been
used for centuries. Multimodality has
entailed the use of: symbols, storytelling, poetry, acting and music to convey
messages related to learning. In 1994, Hal
Adams and Charles Casement describe their use of multimodality with parents they
worked with an urban grassroots group.
The participants were African American moms and dads from a very
impoverished area of the West Side of Chicago marked by poverty and high
unemployment. Moms told stories in the Journal of Ordinary Thought and dad’s
told stories in Through the Eyes of the Villain.
The program was based on
the idea that “every person is a philosopher, that expressing one’s thoughts fosters
fosters creativity and change, and that taking control of life requires
thinking about the world and communicating those thoughts to others.” (Taylor,
p. 189). The men, often told their
stories through the use of rap (music form associated with black men). The program sought to help the participants “see
themselves as thinkers involved in a social activity around thinking and social
activism” in a community context. Stories
were written down, recorded by others, audiotaped, and sung through rap song. This multimodality in the ways the stories
were told resulted in social change in the community.
Twenty tears later, in
the midst of Web 2.0, multimodality has grown to include: blogs, apps and social
media (face book, Twitter, Instagram) to instantly communicate with followers
and simultaneously be authors. The variety of ways in telling stories (photo
shop, podcast, online presentations, posting video’s, animation and video
conferencing) have dramatically changed the ways that social causes are now
represented.
The media landscape is also
marked with new concerns about credibility of authorship of ideas. In regard to multimodality, the Media Project
stated that we will need to look at “new policies and new systems that treat
our airways and our communities as more than markets” (people to consume goods). By this, they mean that since participants
have gained some equal footing in media literacy through producing, and since
literacy has become more democratized with people of varying literacies, we
will have to rethink media literacy and various policies (i.e. who’s in charge)
and what do we do to provide adequate knowledge given the current landscape. Motoko touches on this a bit when he
describes the conflict with some arguing, that “reading on the internet is not
something that needs to be tested – or taught” (p. 10). He quotes Michael Kamil, professor of
education at Stanford, refuting this saying that “students are going to have to
grow up being highly competent on the internet” (p. 10), so therefore education
will need to change ideas of what is literacy and what students need from
education.
What Value
Should Be Ascribed to Emerging and Evolving Online Usage?
They will have to become
highly competent because student’s, and many of the current internet users
including myself and parents, will have to build on our internet literacy
skills to become effective “prosumers”.
According too Lin, T.-B., Li, J.-Y., Deng, F., & Lee, L. (2013),
prosumers are both producers and consumers participating in the internet that
act collectively to “criticize the bias or credibility of the media content
from authoritative institutions”. In
this dual identity as a user and producer, they discuss the importance of looking
at the expanding horizon of the blurred line between experts and non
experts. They write, “that given the technical
and socio-cultural characteristics of new media, individuals today are expected
to express satisfactory new media literacy” (p. 167) in order to be viewed as
experts.
In terms of co-creating and
democratizing knowledge within the community of parents I work with, persons
with generational histories of: poverty, abuse, neglect and racial, class and
gender bias discrimination struggling with dominant culture management, I need
to value specific cultural literary practices.
I need to learn and write
and use images and multimodal modes that parents will connect with going beyond
traditional books and group presentations.
I also need to really work on helping the dominant culture of leadership
in my organization to see the value of parents as being a part of co-creating
knowledge and teaching. There is a
dominant history in the culture of Not- for-Profit organizations as “using”
clients to promote an agenda, usually in fundraising by using their “stories”. That’s typically the limit of internet and
social media inclusion. I would like for
people I work with to be “prosumers” (producers and consumers) of parent
education. I believe that the increasing
the use of media and promoting media literacy in parent education is important
now and in the future. I believe that
parents can become leaders, orchestrating change between amongst each other
using various social media. By co
creating knowledge between each other, and being a part of the process with
them instead of being the dominant “manager” that is telling them how to learn
and get support, I believe that parents will feel an increased sense of
cultural respect that will increase critical thinking and reflection.
References
Lin, T.-B., Li, J.-Y., Deng, F., & Lee, L. (2013).
Understanding New Media Literacy: An Explorative Theoretical Framework. Educational
Technology & Society, 16 (4), 160–170. http://www.ifets.info/journals/16_4/13.pdf
Motoko, R. (2008),
Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times, July 27, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Oldakowski, T.
(2014). A Multimodal Assignment
that Enriches Literacy Learning: The Problem.
Insight: A Journal of Scholarly
Teaching, Vol. 9, 2014 Pp. 70-77. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1035852.pdf.
Taylor, D.
(1997). Many Families, Many Literacies, An International Declaration of
Principles. Heinemann Trade
Publishing, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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