Bayview Beach Resort, Batu Ferringhi Beach, Penang, Malaysia
27-30 September 1999
Texturing the Text
Alison Beynon
Primary School Teacher, Gauteng, South Africa
Abstract
For me, the most exciting challenge of the Multi-Literacy Project is the opportunity it gives teachers to rescue those modes of being and learning which have previously been excised out of the learning has been limited to pen and paper, Read! and Write!, Q & A, text and test, it has severely limited the active and full-bodied engagement of the child. It has thereby bypassed the child's natural capacity to make meaning of the world. In most of our schools, children struggle to make meaning, not of the fluid and vibrating world they happen into, but of the restricted, diluted and abstracted world we offer them in the classroom. Cognition is severed from feeling and motive. To understand becomes a pledge of will rather than an act of desire.
I would like to show that in a proper and honest acknowledgement of the child as child, the full employment of the many and shifting modes the child uses for interacting with the world and understanding it, moves to centre stage. The problem then is to find a pedagogical vehicle rich and flexible enough to carry and also to integrate such a multiplicity of modes. In the middle-school site where I work, I use story-making to that end. For many of the 10 to 14 year-olds I teach, literacy (by any definition) is only just beginning to emerge. For many of those who are "literate" the struggle to read has been so mechanized that meaning has been torn from text.
I would like to show how story-making provides many possibilities for children to move seamlessly from one modality to another, without rupturing the web of meaning-making. Whether listening, conjuring or retelling stories; drawing, acting or miming; expressing story through the mixed media of word and icon; or transforming a story-line into dancechildren explore narrative through a multiplicity of forms. They do this with growing confidence and excitement, and they find their own favoured ways to reconfigure a narrative. In this approach, the accent is on the creation and elaboration of lived meaning. Literacy takes its rightful place as means, not end.
Thus, by bodily immersion in the textured world of narrative, school text gradually comes to be what Lecourt (1975) calls "ardent text". Cognition is ignited from within, unrealized potential is made real.
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Presentations by the South African Multiliteracies Group:
Each member of the group will present his or her own paper on how she or he is implementing Multiliteracies in a specific site.
