Making the Simple Complicated: Multimodal Pedagogy in Service of Presuming Young Adult Literacies

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 9. Developing Literacy Practices and Habits of Reflection: Media, Materials, and Meaning-Making

Abstract

Designing creative writing workshops that include multiple access points for young adults is an important foundational idea to highlighting the various literacies court involved youth partake in. Focusing on multimodality as a pedagogical tool for developing access points into storytelling and discussion, I consider how workshop participants are invited to engage with literacy practices in the workshop space.

Young adults encounter and construct text on a daily basis in a variety of changing ways (Casey, 2012). These multiple literacies ask educators to value the literacy practices that young adults engage with that might not be measurable or observable (Kluth & Chandler-Olcott, 2008). Following Kluth and Chandler-Olcott’s definition of literacy practices: “as a broad and complex set of behaviors” (p.35) Citing Edwards, Heron and Francis, Kluth and Chandler-Olcott discuss expanding the definition of literacy from the ability to read and write to the practice of construing meaning using all available signs within a culture, including visual, auditory, and sensory signs…to become literate, then, students must develop a critical awareness of multiple texts and contexts” (2000, p.1 as cited in Kluth & Chandler-Olcott, 2008). Looking for ways to create workshop activities that presume the competence of all participants, I use this stance along with a multimodal pedagogy to “refuse to limit possibilities” for all participants (Biklen & Burke, 2006, p. 167). Therefore, the emphasis across workshops is finding ways to meet participants where they were in terms of preferred literacies use this to foster engagement.

In effect, the Rube Goldberg machine design and building are conceptualized as a multimodal entry point for discussions about complicated systems. The Rube Goldberg machine is named after the cartoonist Rube Goldberg and entails a complex machine comprised of found objects to make pulleys, wheels, and/or fulcrums in order to complete a simple task, such as, wiping your face with a napkin. During the Rube Goldberg building workshop participants spent time designing machines. In following workshops, participants were thinking, talking and writing about systems within which they choose to participate and those systems within which they are required to participate.

The Rube Goldberg machine is an embodiment of the multimodal pedagogy, working to develop multiple acces points for participants to make connections between building actions/reactions and their own lived realities. The culmination of the workshop series was the development of various scenarios, scripted by workshop participants to address the question, What are some things in your life that are more complicated than they should be? Participants wrote short scenarios related to school, the law, friendships, relationships, time, age, money and trust. The scenarios are analyzed to understand how court involved youth make sense of the institutionalized systems they are involved in.

Multimodal pedagogy offers innovative ways to design curriculum for all young people. If approached from a stance that values all modes of participation and engagement it is a powerful teaching model for creating spaces where court involved youth are comfortable to share their experiences as fundamental building blocks to help view themselves as literacies producers.

Author

• Katherine Newhouse, Teachers College, Columbia University