Multiliteracies Matters

Researcher: So tell me what your movie storyline is.

Jack1: 'Slip, Slop, Slap!'

Nick: Yeah.

Jack: A man like, gets like, burned.

Nick: Sunburnt.

Jack: And he's, like, just got pants on. [No shirt for sun protection] And he's, he's, like, angry. Then he goes into the water, 'cause he thinks it's gunna make it better. But it gets worse. Then he gets angry.

Matthew: Instead [interrupted].

Jack: And then a lifeboat comes up with some sunscreen.

Matthew: Instead of [interrupted].

Jack: And then they all do a dance.

Matthew: Instead of a lifeboat coming up with the sunscreen, why don't we have a big bottle of sunscreen pop up? [He gestures with hands to show figure popping onto the stage from below.]

Mark: We need some sunscreen on it.

Jack: Yeah! How about we make a big bottle of sunscreen and then it walks up to him!

Matthew: Yeah! And it says, 'I'm sunscreen', and pours sunscreen all over him.

These four boys (aged 11–12 years) were collaboratively planning the storyboard or sequence of frames for their animated, digital movie. The movie had an authentic purpose, designed to communicate an educational message to the local school community, and to children in the lower primary grades.

The scenes in the final movie included generic representations of natural recreational sites, such as beaches and coral reef. The Gold and Sunshine Coast, and the Great Barrier Reef, stretch for 2600 km along the Eastern coast of Queensland, the State where the boys live. These places of significance to the boys also play a key role in the tourist-driven economy of regional and metropolitan Queensland. In the vignette above, the boys made an intertextual reference to a famous Australian television health campaign for sun protection entitled 'Slip, Slop, Slap', which originally depicted an animated seagull with a lisp, who teaches viewers to 'Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, and slap on a hat'.

Multiliteracies and Society

Interactions such as these demonstrate important shifts in literacy pedagogy and learning that are tied to broader shifts in the society in which these boys participate. The task of digital movie making required the boys to engage in authentic social practices of communication that are central to a globalised economy, using new technological tools of production, such as digital cameras, and movie editing and distribution software. Designing movies also requires proficiencies with dynamic combinations of modes, such as images, spatial arrangements, music, scripted voiceovers, gestures and animations, which include, but are not limited to, the encoded word (Mills, 2010b).

Historically, schools have emphasised teachers as experts, learners as novices and learning as the reproduction of disciplinary knowledge and decontextualised skills. What is observed here is a significant pedagogical shift, in which students are positioned to think and design collaboratively and creatively within a community of practice. The production of new media-based texts draws upon the collective, specialist and transdisciplinary expertise in open-ended engagements with new media design. This is the nature of new workplaces.

The pace of technological change in contemporary society means that digitally mediated textual practices are critical in a significant number of professions. Likewise, many workplaces emphasise change, flexibility, teamwork and networking rather than hierarchical command structures, deskilled work and mass production (Gee, 1994, 2000). Multi-skilled professionals, who have a broad portfolio of skills, and who engage in a dynamic repertoire of integrated practices, have replaced the division of labour into deskilled components (Cope & Kalantzis, 1999).

The theories presented in this book find their empirical basis in critical ethnographic research, conducted in intensive blocks of fieldwork over a three-year period. The narrative centres on the lives of an Australian teacher and her students in a suburban public school in a low-socioeconomic area. This historical account occurs at a time when these students will enter a globalised labour market. They will have to negotiate a broadening range of meaning-making systems, including online and other multimedia communication environments (New London Group, 2000).

The existing and emerging social practices in which these students must engage include reading books, resisting advertisements, using machines (scanners, printers, voicemail), interpreting public transport information, writing memos, following directories and maps and conducting internet transactions. Similarly, SMS messaging, word processing, emailing, internet relay chatting, internet navigation, critiquing websites, digital photography, slide-show presentations, computer programming and website design represent some of the diverse forms of literacy.

Using spreadsheets and databases, drama and vocal performance, film and media, image design, body language interpretation and oral debating are just a few among a plethora of communication practices used for a multiplicity of purposes in society today. The teacher in this study utilised new approaches to pedagogy to account for the increase of emergent text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies (Kalantzis et al, 2002).

Australian Snapshot

The recent history of public schooling in Australia has seen a falling proportion of the gross domestic product (GDP) spent on the public education system since the 1970s, with the growth of private schooling sector. In 2000, Australia (76%) and Japan (75%) ranked only behind the United States (68%) in terms of the large public share of educational expenditure (Gittins & Tiffen, 2004: 120). Government subsidising of private schooling has had the unintended effect of improving the quality of private schools, rather than their affordability, resulting in increased numbers of students from low-socioeconomic and migrant backgrounds in government schools (Ryan & Watson, 2005).

Most of the children in this study were local residents, many of whom lived in government housing. This housing typically consists of small three-bedroom cottages, each on their own suburban block, and often located along the busy main roads. It is typically allocated to refugees, migrants and the unemployed.

This form of housing is in line with Australia's unusual propensity to suburbanisation, in contrast with the high-density urban residential environments seen in major cities elsewhere. Owning property on free-hold land became accessible to many during the suburban boom of the 1870s and 1880s, when high wages and steady employment provided opportunities for the working class &ndsh; now known in the rhetoric as 'working or...