Reading notes for Oct. 20

Reflecting on CDA

It's official.  It there was any doubt I was CDA before, it's now certain: I'm one of them.

 

I approached this week's selections from Rebecca Rogers' An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education  thinking, "Gee is my man." But the more I read about Gunther Kress, the more intrigued I became. 

 

What's odd is, Fairclough, Gee, and Kress have been with me all along without me even knowing it! On page 9, Rogers mentions the New London Group and their seminal document A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. This is a cornerstone piece of my theoretical frameworks, and I am only now making the connection that all three fellows helped author it!  Weird.

The "New London Group" was mostly, if not entirely, a collective of literacy scholars who called for a radical change in literacy pedagogy in response to “cultural differences and rapidly shifting communications media.” Anyone who writes about or researches the "disconnect" between students’ in-school and out-of-school literacy practices tends to cite the New London Group's theoretical overview of how to successfully leverage new literacies in service of educational goals as well as the personal development and overall well-being of students. 

 

The New London Group took pprogressive-minded educators to task for over-emphasizing "situatedness" in instruction, and they put forth the “pedagogy of multiliteracies” to compensate for the limitations of situated practice by adding in overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. Through critical framing, learners “denaturalize” their growing mastery of practice and “constructively critique it, account for its cultural location, creatively extend and apply it, and eventually innovate on their own, within old communities and in new ones” (pp. 86-87).

 

I have referenced the New London Group "manifesto" as a how-to document for student-centered technology instruction; I had never understood it as a "shared vision" for critical discourse traditions, as Rogers notes (p.9). But it makes sense in light of her explication of the generative aspects of Critical Social Theory, where "the end goal is to hope, to dream, and to create alternative realities that are based in equity, love, peace, and solidarity" (p. 5). This is getting at the "design" side, and I think it explains why I am drawn to Kress' vision. 

 

Overall, it was challenging to tease out the distinctions between Fairclough, Gee, and Kress.  It all started to run together at some point, and they all build on the principle of discourse as socially constitutive and tied up in power systems. Discourse is multimodal, with language/grammar being but one of several representational sign systems. And I took Rogers' caution to heart, that it was not necessary to "choose sides" and that a "hybrid" approach was not only possible but even preferred in light of the various constraints imposed, especially within institutional contexts.

 

However, I did feel a tug toward Kress, on whom I will comment a bit further. 

 

Connecting to Kress

As were some of my classmates, I was intimidated by the discussion around semiotics and wondered if I have the intellectual capacity to take on these ideas. But I liked what little I understood about social semiotics as a sort of buffer against pure critique of social and institutional structures.  Social semiotics looks at how meanings are designed and re-designed through interaction, with implications for those (like me!) who are interested in "the relationship between educational practices and productive uses of power" (Rogers, p. 14).

 

I want to learn more about this "difference between design [social semiotics] and critique" (Rogers, p. 14), and I think this is what separates Kress from the others.  It has something to do with the "material" aspects of discourse and what Rogers notes as Kress' "focus on the sign-maker, rather than the sign" (p. 8).  

 

In Kress' chapter, I just really loved his discussion of the student's rendering of cell with nucleus as an "epistemological commitment."  It sounds high-falootin', but what it suggests to me is this total re-orientation in the classroom to what students know and can do as opposed to the typical deficit model that measures students' learning by how well they enact preconceived "standards" of excellent and how well they perform on achievement tests.

 

You see this a lot in literacy instruction, such as when teachers or parents fail to recognize emergent print concepts and letter formation in a pre-literate child's playful "scribbling," or when adolescents' bonafide text creations (fanfiction, YouTube uploads, personal webpages) are dismissed as "spending too much time playing on the computer."

 

I love Kress' emphasis on multimodality as defined on pp. 208-209. , which suggests a major paradigm shift for classroom teaching. Kress says, "To make a sign is to make knowledge" (p. 211). So powerful!! We say we are always looking for "signs of learning" in the classroom, but are we really? Seldom to we create spaces or make room for "spoken signs" and "image signs."

Reading notes for Oct. 20