Transforming Literacy

Glynda A. Hull

University of California, Berkeley

USA

Keeping Hope Alive

“I believe that in this moment in our history we have something of great import to accomplish by exercising an optimism of the intellect in order to open up ways of thinking that have for too long remained foreclosed.”

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (2000)

“Just as it looked as if we were about to lose the American democratic experiment—in the face of civil war, imperial greed, economic depression, and racial upheaval—in each of these periods a democratic awakening and activist energy emerged to keep our democratic project afloat. We must work and hope for such an awakening once again.”

Cornel West, Democracy Matters (2004)

DUSTY: Digital Underground Storytelling for You(th)

Community-based technology center operating in collaboration with university, church, schools

Offering access to and meaningful uses of information technologies

New technologies that allow multi-media, multi-modal literacy

Providing programs for children, youth, adults, and seniors from community and mentoring opportunities for students from university

On-going research on participants’ experiences and center’s role in community

Conceptualizing Diversity

• Racial/Ethnic• Linguistic

• Socio-Economic• Generational

• Institutional• Spatial

• Semiotic

Semiotics (in lieu of Linguistics)

• Speech and writing are still dominant modes of representation and communication.

• But new media (information technologies) make it easier to use and combine multiple modes.

• Now we can combine writing, spoken language, images, moving pictures, gesture, song, dance, music.

Conceptualizing literacy….

….a familiarity with the full range of communicative tools, media, and modes (oral, written, visual, gestural, performative),

….plus an awareness of and a sensitivity to the power and importance of representation of self and others,

…along with the space and support to communicate critically, aesthetically, lovingly, and agentively

Overview

• Context: Welcome to West Oakland and DUSTY

• Theories: Identity, Geography, and New Literacy Studies/Semiotics

• Voices and Literacies from West Oakland• Conclusions about Language, Literacy, and

Diversity

West Oakland, CA

Educational Reform in the US

Much urban school reform is concerned with accountability and efficiency, embracing business practices and values

Can’t solve problems of schools by focusing on schools alone or just looking within schools, and ignoring poverty, legacies of racism, and economic climates

Other models: Community “Development” (e.g., Kevin Johnson’s St. Hope Academy in Oak Park, California)

Universities as Responsible to Local Communities

DUSTY: Digital Underground Storytelling for You(th)

• After-School Programs DST & Homework Programs for Elementary-Age Children and Middle School Youth

• Evening Digital Visual Programs for Older Youth/Young Adults

• Digital Music Program• Adult Classes/Workshops• Intergenerational Oral History Projects• After-School Programs at School Sites in

Collaboration with Teachers, Administrators

Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement

Perspectives from Theory

• Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Identity and the Ethnography of Personhood

• Cultural Geography: The Experience and Representation of Space and Place

• New Literacy Studies and Semiotics: Multi-Media and Multi-Modality

Identity as……enacted through and mediated by language and other

cultural artifacts;…amalgamated from past experiences, available cultural

resources, and possible subject positions in the present and future;

…indexing social positions or one’s privilege or lack thereof in relation to that of others;

…inseparable from learning and especially mastery or the acquisition of expertise;

…continuously revised; and …articulated through story or narrative.

A Tellable Self

Selves, like cultures, are not so much preserved in stories as they are created, reworked, and revised through participation in everyday narrative practices that are embedded in and responsive to shifting interpersonal conditions. Memories of self and other provide a constantly updated resource that narrators exploit in projecting tellable and interpretable selves” (Miller, 1995, pp. 175-176).

At DUSTY, participants….

…use multi-media, multi-modality to articulate pivotal moments in their lives and reflect on life trajectories.

…by means of these technologies and modalities and social practices, reposition themselves as agents in and authors of their own lives.

How Place/Space Shape Identity

• Residential segregation in US as a means of creating racial identities

• Design and control of space as a means of constructing youth culture

“From being able to have a room of one’s own (at least in richer families) to hanging out on particular corners, to clubs where only your own age group goes, the construction of spatiality can be an important element in building a social identity.” (Doreen Massey, 2002)

Social Spaces, Social Relationships, and

Symbolic Resources “An analysis of the

production of social space is an analysis of the production of social relationships, implying an emphasis upon relationships of power that are articulated across material and symbolic resources.”

(Leander, 2002)

Youth from the community, undergraduates, and a graduate student collaborate at DUSTY

Literal and Figurative Notions of Space at DUSTY

• Importance of safe space physically• Importance of social and physical space which

invites equal access to symbolic and material resources

• Importance of social and physical space which arranges collaboration across diversities, but which cultural/ethnic/age-specific groups can “claim”

• Importance of conceptions of space and activity that are both local and global

Multi-Literacies (New London Group, 1996)

Increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity

Multiplicity of communication channels and media--which differ according to culture and context, and which have different affordances

Multi-Media, Multi-Modality

“…there are now choices about how what is to be represented should be represented: in what mode, in what genre, in what ensembles of modes and genres on what occasions” (G. Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age, 2003, p. 117)

Literacy…. Choosing among and using available technologies, media, and modalities for expression and communication

The Pictoral Turn (W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994)

Ours is an age in which the pictoral turn has supplanted the linguistic one, as images push words off the page and our lives becomes increasingly mediated by a popular visual culture.

Distinctive contrasts to the primarily linguistic texts and the forms of textual reasoning that predominate in schools and universities

Sustained attention to the visual isn’t a customary part of schools’ literacy curricula, and in fact, there is much ambivalence toward it in the US

Voices and Literacies from West Oakland

• Lyfe-N-Rhyme: Randy’s Critique of Life and Times in West Oakland, California and the USA

• Taj’s “Delicate Man” Animation• Cristina’s Journal • From India to Oakland and Back Again• Mo’s “In Memorium”• Undergraduates Reflect on Being Volunteers

Introducing Randy

• Speaker of AAVE, fluid code-switcher• High school leaver• Didn’t write in school, but wrote a lot outside of

school: mostly raps• Required to attend a vocational IT program in lieu

of being incarcerated• Works at a warehouse during day; cares for son in

the evening• Talented musician, loyal son, social critic, poet

Interview Excerpt: Randy and Job Hunting

“Frustrated Soul” came from job hunting…. From me being frustrated, turning in application after application. I was working a job at a card board place right there on 8th (Street), and I had 90-day probation, so on my 90th day, I passed the probation. On my 91st day they laid me off….They said “you’ll be back in like two weeks”. They didn’t call me back for like a month and a half. I quit my City of Oakland job for this job. So then they called me back a month and a half later, letting me work for a week, then they laid me off for 4 more months. Then I get a letter that I’m terminated. You know what I’m saying?” (Interview, 10/31/02)

DUSTY as Pathway

It made a way for me to put this stuff [creative bent, his musical talent in particular] to use, so I can be here [inside his apartment] and not miss anything. I can do what I want to do. I don’t have to be in the street. It [the opportunity to be in DUSTY] was like right on time.” Because that was when the murder rate was getting high. My partner got killed around the corner, another one around here. And it just took me off the street. … And it gave me a chance to use my creativity and tell my story. (Interview, 10/31/02)

“Lyfe-N-Rhyme”• Two-minute video narrated by Randy, performing his

original poem/rap

• Miles Davis tune as background music

• Illustrates, complements, or otherwise accompanies the words and music with approximately 80 images

• No visual transitions, such as fading

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What’s Powerful about Lyfe-n-Rhyme?

• Striking visuals, many of them photographs taken by Randy

• Rhythm, prose/poetry

• Word plus beat

• Images paired with words

• Social critique

• Representation of self as agent

Literate Art of Digital Stories

Recontexualiation of Images (cf. Bauman & Briggs)

Randy “decenters” famous figures, like the Sphinx and Tupac and Marcus Garvey, removing them from their particular historical contexts, and recenters them, recontextualing them in his own creative universe of this digital story and his own social world of Oakland, California.

Mixed Media/Modalities

All media are mixed, but have different sensory and semiotic ratios. (Seeing itself is not a visual medium, but rather, is always engaged with other sensory channels.) (W.T.J. Mitchell, 2004)

We can ask of multi-media/multi-modal texts: What sense activates or leads another? How do such texts afford the “braiding” of signs and senses? To what semiotic, aesthetic, and emotional effects?

Dimensions & Possibilities of Digital Stories(with thanks to Ochs & Capps, Living Narratives:

Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, 2001)

Synesthesia Modes Tightly Modes Loosely

Integrated Integrated

Appropriation/

Recontextualization

Of Found Images

Images Altered Images

Physically and/or Adopted As Is

Conceptually

Positionality of

Storyteller

More Agentive Agentive Stance

Stance not Apparent

Emotionality High Impact Low Impact

Addressivity Addressed to Addressed to

Broad Audience Particular People

Randy’s “Lyfe-n-Rhme”:Realization of Semiotic Possibilities

Synesthesia Music, words, images braided together

Appropriation/

Recontextualization

Of Found Images

Found images altered physically and conceptually

Positionality of

StorytellerAgentive authorial stance

Emotionality High Impact

Addressivity Addressed to broad audience

Interview Excerpts

Synesthesia: “I make the beat too, and a beat like that, it’s good vibrations, but some of the pictures are about homeless people, you see beer cans, heroin needles.”

Recontextualization: “So that’s just taking a regular billboard and shaving off the things that they’re promoting and focusing more on what they’re saying.”

Addressivity: “It’s cool ‘cause I can get somebody to listen to me.”

Kids, Too! Taj the Animator• 9 years old; African American and East Indian

heritage• “I don't like my neighborhood because people

hang by the liquor store and talk loud all night.”• Got in some fights and was picked on; kids

bombarded him with the dodge ball• Loved techno music, science fiction, super hero

stories; wanted to be an animator

“Delicate Man”: The Vulnerable Super Hero

• Imaginary character, “Delicate Man,”• Events that took place at DUSTY• How the super hero got his powers:

accidentally put into a scientist’s mutating machine and cut into pieces

• Super powers: he falls apart!• 42 images drawn in PhotoShop• Composed his own digital music

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Taj, the Delicate Boy

• Didn’t enjoy or do well at school, but didn’t miss a day at DUSTY

• Had trouble writing, but dictated easily; performed his typed text

• Clearly understood and exploited the genre of super hero stories

• Developed socially at DUSTY, making friends• Penchant for science fiction, superheroes meshed

with available technological means

Process Dimensions and Possibilities

Leading Modalities

Oral Written Images Music

Story Story

Co-

Construction

Solo Joint Multiple

Discovery of New Perspectives

Positionality Positionality

Unhanged Changed

Appropriation of Technology

Requires Steady Works More

Assistance Independently

Effect on Teller Little Enjoyment Revelation

Effect Authorial Agency

Catharsis

Bilingual kids, too, like Dr. Cristina

• 7 year-old in 3rd grade whose family had immigrated from El Salvador

• Soft-spoken and quiet, she used the opportunity to share her writing as a chance to elaborate orally.

• Fluent in Spanish, she tolerated her older brother’s attempts to help her find the words she wanted in English and to correct her facts.

• First digital story was entirely in English, but her second was done partly in Spanish.

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“Performing Agentive Identities through Multimedia Composing: A Case Study

of Selina” by Mira-Lisa Katz (2004)

• 12-yr.-old English/Spanish bilingual born in the US to parents from El Salvador

• Shifting attitudes toward Spanish• Linguistic trajectory: preferences for public

and privates uses of 1st and 2nd language shift over time

• After-school as a space for enacting multilingual self

Case Studies: Chris, a Cambodian-American 5th Grader

“’When I Went Fishing’: How a Cambodian Boy in an African American Community Crosses Cultural Boundaries through Digital Storytelling”

--Jean Yonemura Wing (2004)

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Exchanging Cultures: From India to California

• In 2000 Dr. Urvashi Sahni installed a computer in Madantoosi Village, U.P. , India, powered by solar panels.

• Later developed and provided software in Hindi in science

• Involved teachers and students in software production

• Digital story exchange initiated with DUSTY in 2002

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Translation from Hindi“This is our village Madantoosi. This is our school and we

all study in it happily. This is our Panchayat house (council home). There are many animals in our village—like goats, cows, calves, and bulls. There is a lake in our village and a hand pump. This is a man selling clothes on a cycle (there are no shops in villages). And this is our Pradhan’s (village headman’s) house.”

(The children added that “the Pradhan’s house is the largest house in the village. He has a tractor, 2 motorcycles, and a grinding machine, electricity, and a phone. We all look like we belong to him in this picture.”)

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Genres and Purposes

• Autobiographical Narratives

• Descriptions of Place/Neighborhood

• Poems/Raps• Social Critique/PSA• Re-enactments of

Cartoons, Comics, Movies, Video Games

• Reports, Biographies, Interviews

• Offer a tribute to Family Members, Friends

• Represent/Interpret a Pivotal Moment/Key Event

• Represent Community and/or Community History

• Create Art/Artifact• Play/Fantasize• Heal/Grieve/Reflect• Reach/Inform/Influence

Wider Audience

Mo’s GriefWell one thing about it, when I came to Dusty, I hadn’t cried, which is

something I don’t do [Mm] I never cry and the uh you know at each meeting, when I would come, it was like a relief valve every time I came….I got stronger, and the valve got lighter, you know. It’s like pressure.. And less pressure and less pressure and then I finally got really comfortable and as I got comfortable I named Michael the Angle and I named Glynda the Good Witch because of the way I felt was that at that time in my life that’s what God had sent to me…..I needed a way to express my grief. I needed a way to accept my grief and my story and I also needed to know that even though it was going to be a hard time, you could make new friends, you could have new acquaintances and you know that you’re not so low. There’s always, you know it’s like God has closed the door, slammed it in my face and when I came to Dusty, I found out that He opened a window so that I would go have a way out.

Digital Stories about Pop Culture Icons

“My name is Damisie, and I’m 21 years old and my favorite rapper of all time is Tupac Shakur. Since I was ten years old I’ve been listening to his music....I looked at Tupac as being a role model. He inspired me to become anything I want to be.”

New Directions: Digital Music

People who write about curriculum and instruction usually ignore the role of popular culture in the production of identities among youth. And even when work is done on popular culture, it’s often on visual media and not popular music. This despite the fact “music is…at the epicenter of practices of discursive identity formation for the young.” (p. 2)

—Cameron McCarthy et al. (1999). Sound identities: Popular music and the cultural politics of education.

Music and Identity Formation

“So powerful is the desire to make music with others that one is tempted to conceive of music-making as an emergent, radical engagement with consciousness; an engagement which can ‘rattle’ the hegemony of everyday life and open up the possibility of a common ground where differences might meet, mingle, and engage one another” (p. 447).

—Glenn M. Hudak. (1999). The ‘sound’ identity: Music-making and schooling.

Research Questions

• What are the affordances of multi-media, multi-modal genres and composing environments? What is the relationship between digital storytelling print-based literacy?

• What identities are fostered through access to the digital media, social relationships, and contexts for learning at a community technology center?

• What constitutes “development,” for different individuals and groups, for the institutions, and for the community?

Types of Data

• Participant Observation Field Notes

• Formal/Informal Interviews

• Multi-Media Artifacts

• Print-based literacy Artifacts

• Video and Audio Recordings

• Pre/Post Skills Inventories

• Pre/Post Surveys • Standardized Test

Scores for Matched Sample Comparisons

• Service hours/Demographics

What We’ve Learned

• Power and ability of children, youth, adults, and seniors as multi-media, multi-modal creators

• Power of alternative spaces for learning/identity development

• Power of multiple media, multiple modes for communication, expression, and meaning-making

Pedagogy/Participant Structures

Vygotskian concept of the “zone of proximal development”--

assisting learner in doing something that she can’t yet do on her own

Interplay of Emotion, Cognition, and Human Action

Vygotsky’s vision of “a dynamic system of meaning” in which “the affective and the intellectual unite” (Thought & Language, 1986, p. 10)

Dewey’s call for “fusion of intellectual and the emotional, of meaning and value” (How We Think, 1933, p. 278)

Enacting an Agentive Self

Enacting an agentive self can be pivotal for learning and motivation.

Conversely, the opportunity to be successful as a learner and doer can foster a view of self as agent, able to influence present circumstances and future possibilities, and to situate self in relation to others in socially responsible ways. 

It is such a view of self, and continual opportunities to enact this self in relation to new skills, technologies, knowledge, and practices, that is central for development in both children and adults.

Aesthetics and Sensoriness

“How might we as educators talk about the aesthetic, argue for its role in the development of literacy, in these high-stakes testing and standardizing times?”

How might we as educators deepen our awareness of the role of the senses in learning as well as be more attuned to the integration of the material body and consciousness?

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Beauty in the Midst of Confusion

Randy: “I said, ‘it’s rough out here, yeah that you can bet, but I guess there’s 2 sides to every sunset.’ So on the one side there’s all this confusion, which symbolizes to me the government, and then you’ve got all these wires going across. But in the midst of all that there’s still all this beauty, right there.”

Shirley Brice Heath, “Seeing our Way into Learning”

“The swirl of verbal, visual and gestural interactions that proceed out of engagement with multiple modes of representation ensures development of abilities to focus, strategise, discern and explicate components and integrate possibilities through future scenarios. The future curriculum needs to integrate visual, verbal and other representational modes as schools move closer in goals and process to non-school learning communities and organizations” (2000, p. 121).

DUSTY as a Learning Space for Youth and Adults

• Uses of, choices among multiple modes/modalities and creation and communication of valued cultural forms

• Bridges connecting traditional literacy, new literacies, popular culture, academic discourse

• Repeated entry points for participation across time• Relationships that engender movement and

participation across social contexts• Multiple opportunities to enact an agentive and

socially responsible self

Cornell West on Academics Engaging the Larger Culture

“…if I wanted to present a danceable education to young people in their own idiom I would do so.”(p. 194)

“My vision of academic engagement embraces…academic standards of excellence yet also revels in overcoming the huge distance between the elite world of the universities, the young people in the hood, and the democratic activists who fight for social change.” (p. 199)

—Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (2004).

Undergraduates: Our Future Educators

• Enrolled in “American Cultures” course taught in School of Education on “New Literacies”

• 50-55% Asian American, 30-35% White, 5-10% Latino/Chicano, 5% African American

• Volunteer 45 hrs a semester in after-school program• Research on undergraduate experience: questionnaires;

analysis of their fieldnotes, case studies• Final Assignment: “Reflect on the Course But Don’t

Write an Essay!”• Brad and Lamar: “DUSTY is in between school and

fun.”

Challenges• Collaboration across diversities• Making a difference in school

literacies/identities• Making a difference in job placement/material

circumstance• Recruitment/outreach• Spatial organization/rights• Building/sustaining relationships w/ other

organizations and non-profits• Funding, burn-out

Pippa Stein on “Multimodal Pedagogies” (in Norton & Toohey, 2004)

“Multimodal pedagogies allow for the expression of a much fuller range of human emotion and experience; they acknowledge the limits of language, admit the integrity of silence, and do not presume closure.”

“How can the classroom as a space for meaning making be a complex, hybrid space founded on diverse histories, multiple modes of representation, epistemologies, feelings, languages, and discourses which can become harnessed for productivity and regenerativity?”

Transforming Literacy

• Move beyond the old dichotomies such as orality/literacy; personal/analytic; and cognition/emotion

• Provide access to a diversity of semiotic systems• Make space for aesthetic uses of language/literacy along

side instrumental ones• Construct paths to and from popular culture and academic

discourse• Expect, embrace the hybridity of cultural artifacts• Cross geographic and social borders literally, symbolically,

and materially• Position students as agents capable of making their worlds

~Thank You~

• Randy• Cristina• Taj• Ms. Shannon and Dusty’s Heroes• Children from Madantoosi Village • Students from DUSTY Middle School program• UC Berkeley Undergraduates• Michael Angelo James, DUSTY Co-Founder and

Director

• Glynda Hull, DUSTY Co-Founderglynda@socrates.berkeley.edu

• Michael James, DUSTY Co-Founder and Directormangelo@uclink.berkeley.edu

• Mary Solits, DUSTY Sites Coordinator and Research Directormasoltis@cabrillo.edu