This new world is a multimodal world. Language is one mode; images, actions, sounds, and physical manipulation are other modes. Today, students need to know how to make and get meaning from all these modes alone and integrated together. In the 21st century anyone who cannot handle multimodality is illiterate. They must be able to handle it critically, since without critical and analytic skills a multimodal world of games, ads, news, and other media is a world where it is easier than ever to lie, scam, dupe, and manipulate people.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Disabled ways of languaging are primarily about modality.
Crip Linguistics Intro
Modality: The degree to which we are to consider the realistic or fictional qualities of an image or multimodal ensemble. A high degree of modality suggests the image is very realistic, while a low degree of modality suggests the image is very fictional or abstract.
Mode: A system of visual and verbal entities created within or across various cultures to represent and express meanings. Photography, sculpture, written language, paintings, music, and poetry are types of modes.
Multimodality: An interdisciplinary approach that understands representation and communication extend beyond written language and includes a multiplicity of modes. It refers to the theory that meanings are represented and communicated across and within cultures by a wide variety of semiotic resources.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Multimodality
Language has always and ever been a multimodal performance.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series) (p. xi). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Frank Serafini, author of the fantastic “Reading the Visual,” refers to these print, visual, and video combinations as “multimodal ensembles” to capture the fact we rarely encounter information in a single mode anymore.
Whether we’re viewing a snapchat or reading an online article, most of the texts we engage with convey meaning across several modes that shape the meanings within.
Reading the World: The Case for Multimodal Literacy – National Council of Teachers of English
Multimodal literacy isn’t about pretty pictures and popsicle sticks. It’s not about Pinterest Pedagogy. It’s about honing a sense-making skillset our students can use to navigate the complex times in which we live.
Reading the World: The Case for Multimodal Literacy – National Council of Teachers of English
Central assumptions of multimodal approaches to representation and communication are: (a) that communication is always and inevitably multimodal; and (b) that each of the modes available for representation in a culture provides specific potentials and limitations for communication.
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996)
Today’s communications environments, particularly since the rise of digital media, are increasingly multimodal. Written meanings are closely connected with visual, spatial, tactile, gestural, audio and oral modes of meaning. It is hard—in fact, it is a mistake—to try to separate reading and writing from these other modes for the practical reason that they are so closely related to today’s media.
Navigating contemporary social spaces requires the application of not just one set of rules for meaning-making (literacy in the singular), but the negotiation of different literacies depending on the people and contexts you encounter. There are, in other words, many literacies and these vary according to cultural context, social purpose, life experience, personal interest, knowledge base, and so on. The key is not learning how to communicate in the one, right way, but how to negotiate these differences in meaning.
Literacies – New Learning Online
The world outside school today is replete with words married to images, sounds, the body, and experiences. When we play a video game we integrate words, maps, images, actions, goals, choices, and experiences. We manipulate a surrogate body, our avatar in the game. Science books and articles today are replete with graphs, images, and diagrams. As we move to digital books, books will become media full of images, videos, simulations, games, and representations readers will be able to handle and manipulate and even build.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
In general, the modes used in print-based multimodal ensembles fall into three categories: (1) textual elements, which include all written language; (2) visual images like photography, painting, drawings, graphs, and charts; and (3) design elements like borders, typography, and other graphic elements. These represent the basic elements used in print-based, multimodal ensembles. As the texts we encounter shift from print-based to digital or screen-based, the range of modes used in these texts expands to include sound effects, moving images, and other digitally rendered elements. It is easy to see how the complexity of multimodal ensembles expands exponentially in a digital environment.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
20 Learning Modalities
The 20 Learning Modalities (this may not be a complete list) that the physical school must support are’:
The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash
- Independent study
- Peer tutoring
- Team collaboration
- One-on-one learning with teacher
- Lecture format – teacher-directed
- Project-based learning
- Technology with mobile computers
- Distance learning
- Internet-based Research
- Student Presentation
- Performance-based learning
- Seminar-style instruction
- Inter-disciplinary learning
- Naturalist learning
- Social/emotional/spiritual learning
- Art-based learning
- Storytelling
- Design-based learning
- Team teaching/learning
- Play-based learning
Modality Chauvinism
Hamraie (2013) asks us to think about the politics of access through the framework of interdependence. Languaging, as an important site of access—to the world, to politics, to belonging, to citizenship—thus demands that we think about this through the lens of collective access and care. Rejecting monolingualism and mono-modality are two beginning steps. Embracing time, space, and material environments in meaning-making are also preliminary steps. Interdependence also asks us to think about our built environments and how that impacts access (Hamraie, 2013), and in our case, language. Hamraie (2017) also instigates us to consider how discrimination is built into the structures around us, the buildings, the foundations, the frameworks, and theories, and so on. When in the process of crippling linguistics, we question how modality chauvinism has been built into the various language focused fields and the perspectives of what language is and what is good languaging. Hamraie and Fritsch’s (2019) practices of “interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be understood as alternative political technologies through Crip technoscience” (p.13). Crip technoscience is “critique, alteration, and reinvention” (p.2). It is how disabled people alter and reinvent the world in order to make access happen. The relationship between science, technology, and language is such that the dismissal of disabled ways of languaging has resulted in inaccessible technologies.
Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto | Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability
Providing Multiple Modalities is Care Work
Crip linguistics frames language as a form of care work where we work collectively to provide access and co-construct meaning.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics
Multimodal or Multimedia
MULTIMODAL OR MULTIMEDIA
A distinction needs to be made between mode and media. Media (singularly medium) are the technologies used for the rendering and dissemination of texts, in particular multimodal ensembles. Television, radio, the Internet, electronic books, and DVDs are all media used in the production and dissemination of multimodal ensembles. Modes draw on semiotic resources for the articulation, representation, and interpretation of texts, whereas media draw on semiotic resources for the dissemination of texts.
To blur the distinction a bit, modes and media cut across sensory channels; its path of perception does not characterize the nature of a particular mode. For example, language can be heard, spoken, perceived visually, and touched via braille texts. It can also be disseminated through CDs, radio, television, and the Internet. As the range of available modes for articulating, representing, and interpreting texts grows, and the variety of media for disseminating texts expands, we as educators need to consider the challenges these changes represent for literacy education.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
