"It Makes It More Real": Teaching New Literacies in a Secondary English Classroom (Bailey)

I found this article to be an excellent look at what it means to actually adopt a "new literacies" mindset and curriculum.  While reading the first section of Bailey's findings, "Multimodality as a spoonful of sugar," I was cringing from guilt.  Using technology as a hook--and/or to make the material more palatable--is probably the main way I use technology.  Looking for irony in song lyrics and plot arch in a sitcom?  Those sound like delightful intos!  And not unlike lessons I've planned.  So when Bailey tore Carol a new one (no jk, she was actually p understanding) I was feeling pretty bad about myself:

While she thought it was important to include digital technologies and other means of expression, such as music, in her literacy lessons, she still considered these elements as separate and dichotomous when comparing each with print literacy.  She was asked in the first meeting of her graduate class what she hoped to accomplish by taking the course, and she wrote, "Use more technology effectively and enhance student literacy by using technology" [*gasp*]...Carol seemed to consider literacy and technology as separate, rather than"a mutually constitutive relation"...Additionally, assume that by using "technology"(meaning computer technologies, and also television, music, and film), students would be more likely to learn with and about printed texts because technology is often engaging and motivating for students. (216)

I am no stranger to using multimodal activities to "[prime students] for the traditional lessons in authorized knowledge that would follow" and Bailey is so right: it's never as effective as I want it to be (217).  I'll have a rad couple of days of intos where I have students look for literary elements in multimodal texts and get them seemingly engaged, but they never want to make the connection back once the "authorized knowledge" begins.  HOWEVER, I also realized that my goal in planning such lessons is more to tap into my students' cultural linguistic reservoirs and show how content functions in their lives, not to teach new literacies.  So I was very interested to read that Carol moved to "direct instruction about the various aspects and conventions of multimodality" (225).  For as much as we talk about the importance of being explicit, that would have never occurred to me.  I completely forgot that in new literacy instruction, students' knowledge about technology and multimodal texts is tacit, and that they probably lack the language with which to talk about it.  So that was a nice reminder.  Talk to the children about font and color!  Remind them that in the texts they encounter, EVERYTHING is intentional, as it should be in the texts they compose as well.

Another rad thing for me was hearing that:

Social constructivist theories that emphasize inquiry were also important for explaining Carol's emphasis on students' local knowledge in a new literacies curriculum...By allowing students increasing opportunities to use discussion and social interaction to raise and answer questions, Carol seemed to find in an inquiry model one effective 'organizing principle' for her curriculum. As she came to realize how rich students' experiences and questions were, Carol increasingly encouraged students to use what they knew in order to learn in her classroom. (210)

We haven't talked much about new literacies and inquiry in tandem, so I appreciated having in spelled out.  "Computers became tools to the students, affording them an opportunity to create multimodal texts, and the texts themselves became their motivational focus...when new literacies were the daily work of the class, students learned literary elements, poetic devices, rhetorical elements, and used reading and writing strategies in ways that previous classes never had before" (229-30).  For the first time ever, Carol's students were asking why.  They "were not only learning to identify the devices that poets use...they were also actually able to discuss them as subjects of their own inquiry" (219). That's the dream.