I have chosen to use the popular Shrek 2 cartoon movie as a lesson resource as it is one of the more controversial cartoons that challenges the ideologies of typical fairy tales. By evaluating how stereotypes are challenged in Shrek 2 through a deconstruction of the movie, it is hoped that students will be able to take a more critical stance in analysing texts and images to question the realities depicted by the society.

To start off the lesson, the teacher can ask students to describe how the typical fairy tale characters (Prince, princess, stepmother etc.) usually look like and students would probably give the following responses:

Prince - Tall, handsome, strong
Princess - Fair, slim, beautiful, big eyes
Stepmother - Old, evil looking eyes (Slitted eyes)
Hero - Man, brave, big eyes, tall
Villian - Dark, ugly, sharp features, evil looking eyes (Slitted eyes)

Following that, teacher will show the cartoon Shrek 2 (As I can only find the trailer, it will be used to represent the show) and students will be asked if anything has changed, based on how they interpret the gender and racial representation in fairy tales. In this way, students will be able to go through the meaning making process to extract the hidden ideologies and stereotypes that exist within the "innocent-looking" cartoons.

Lastly, the teacher can get students to rewrite another fairy tale to challenge some of the stereotypes that exist in the story and they can also try to draw pictures to illustrate how the characters may look like in their modified versions.

8:36 AM

Like what was discussed in class, "The affordances of new technologies reconfigure the multimodal aspects of reading and writing in ways that are newly significant for reading." As we can see, writing's functional load has since shifted quite a fair bit since the advancement of technology, which allowed the visual mode to 'take over' writing. This shows the decentring of writing as its role on the screen changed from a dominant role to a 'supporting role' as mentioned by Alen.

As for writing as a label or caption, it is clearly shown in this website that I am going to introduce to all of you --> Roald Dahl's Official website

The main page of the website includes a combination of a 'hand written' font type and another font type which seems to be the usual font type used in Roald Dahl books. The use of the hand written font marks the 'presence' or 'essence' of a human writer, as mentioned by Jewitt and it seems to suggest a close relationship with its audience, especially because it appears to be physically hand written by a hand right at the start when the website is loaded. In this case, its audience is being connected to the author, Roald Dahl, throughout the website as each page's title/label is being 'hand written' by a hand everytime the pages load. Moreover, the connectedness with its audience is further enhanced through the scribbling sound made when the hand writes on the labels.

Something I would like to note is the relations of coherence in the main page. The initial quizzical music that was played when the page loads, the animated 'paper cutout' characters (that looks like the characters in Roald Dahl's stories) and the random animals and boy that appear every now and then, seem to all reinforce the 'fantasy comes alive' theme that Roald Dahl instills in his own stories. Like what Jewitt says, such a "realisation of the same theme simultaneously through a range of modes, makes the theme more salient than it would be of it were only realised in one mode."

Upon clicking on the hyperlink, "Roald Dahl", I was led to a page where 6 sub links popped out and I clicked on "An interview with Roald Dahl". In this section, I was able to click on the random numbers on the left which represents the different interviews that I can view and listen to.

Upon clicking on Interview 4, I can immediately hear Roald Dahl's voice talking about the question posed to him. His audio interview is accompanied by a written version in the white space on the right. Personally, I was more drawn to the audio version of the interview rather than the written form as I felt as if I was present during his interview and was more closely connected to Roald Dahl. Such use of audio in this case encourages new potentials for engagement of its audience, especially the younger crowd.

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As with my brief analysis above, we can see that such a multimodal website like this uses all the various modes to "convey multiple meanings and allows its audience to reject a single interpretation and to hold possible multiple readings of a text" (Coles and Hall, 2001) through taking multiple reading paths. Every time when I enter the website, I may not always go through the same reading path. Instead, I may make/remake new meanings as there is no linear route to reading.

9:55 AM

From Stein's article, I understand that we as teachers should embrace multimodal pedagogies in an effort to broaden up the range of representation modes in our classroom. By opening ourselves up to accept other modes of representations, we will be able to accommodate socially and/or culturally disadvantaged pupils who may not have access to the privileged modes like spoken and written forms. Pupils can then be empowered with the freedom to construct and represent their 'voice'.

This forms the basis of Stein's six main assumptions of multiliteracies, which are as follows:

In Point 5, Stein suggests that language is limited to what can be represented. Sometimes, certain emotions or human experience may not be aptly expressed through language, which brings me to the silent movies that came about in the 18th century, where body language and facial expression were used to portray the actors' feelings and emotions to the audience.

Due to this assumed limited role that language alone plays in meaning making, meaning making should be multimodal (Point 3), which means making use of the various materiality of modes (time/space-based modes).

Such modes are usually thought of by me as referring to texts and visuals. But I am ignoring a very important mode, which is our bodies (Point 2). Our bodies have "a wide range of means of engagement with the world," (Kress, 2000c, p.184 in Stein, 2004) which makes it a good site of multimodal resources that allows us to express meanings that may not be possible with other modes. Our body has the ability to hold language and silence, therefore, I will show a video on how the actors in silent films as mentioned earlier convey meanings in bodily and sensory ways.



Also, I found the following video to illustrate how silence and the action of lighting a candle captures people's attention and invoke their emotions on the issue of AIDS (which is said to be unspeakable in certain contexts). Language in this case, comes right at the end only to complement the message. In my opinion, the texts that come out at the end symbolises the breaking of silence of the AIDS issue by the Western-dominated media.

10:57 PM

After reading Hull & Vasudevan's articles, I was immediately pulled into the idea of authoring my new identity, probably another side of me that is not known to my NIE friends. I did it through a simple slide show of some pictures which I used to represent myself, my life and some thoughts that went through my head before. I used a multimodal approach by combining visuals, texts (some are in the form of taglines that appear when you mouseover the pictures) and music.

In a way, I am 'counterstorytelling' to depict some reality about myself to challenge others who may construct a different reality of me. Such a way of expressing myself gives me a 'voice' and I am inevitably making myself heard/known to others, something I might not be able to achieve on my own. As Vasudevan (2006) mentioned, I want to be known for who I am, not for who I ain't and I want to re(claim) my right to author myself into new narratives.

*Please note that the song has been made to not play automatically, so when you watch the slideshow, do click on the audio icon at the top left corner to play the song*


I have given a very simple example of how our students can be given a chance to express themselves in this digital age, where "forms and practices of communication and representation are crucial in our new times" (Hull, 2003). This slide show provides an avenue for younger children who may not be as IT savvy, to start off by uploading pictures that says things about themselves. Although there may be restrictions by using slide shows, but I feel that it makes a good starting point for them.

8:38 AM

This is agreed upon Allan Luke (1995) as he says that written texts are refractive in the way that they "actively construct and represent the world." Thus construing the fact that being able to read critically is an important skill to acquire such that one will be able to uncover the underlying ideologies, reality and relationship depicted by the text makers in a particular cultural context.

Following Freebody and Luke’s (1990) four‐part model for “Reading as Critical Social Practice”, I will attempt to analyse a multimodal advertisement that was found at bus-stop stands in Singapore using the 4 elements of the model - Coding, Semantic, Pragmatic, and Critical Competences.

Coding Competence (How do I crack this?)
Firstly, there is a danger sign pasted right in the middle of a popular handheld game set, and even if one is illiterate, there is a icon with an exclamation mark, which non-arbitrarily relates to the action of 'warning'.

Furthermore, the danger sign made use of colours like yellow and black to emphasize the warning as the two colours have a non-arbitrary relationship with danger (Just like bees).

Framing was used to separate the word 'Danger' and the icon from the rest of the text. The word 'Danger' and the icon are emphasized through the use of a larger font size and it is placed right at the top of the whole text. The next most prominent message has the second largest font size and the two-liner text is placed right in the center of the whole text. Textually, the message is to be read in a left-right directionality, which is usually the norm for texts.

On the danger sign, we can see the following message,

Armed with a basic alphabetic, spelling, punctuation knowledge and phonemic and phonological awareness, one will be able understand that the message is trying to say that devices such as handheld computer games and handphones may harm children's eyes in the long run and lead to myopia. Children are better off playing outdoors.

Pragmatic Competence (What do I do with this, here and now?)
This illustrates the multimodality of this advertisement which uses image and text to achieve the effects they want on its audience. The image is cleverly used so that the ad makers do not need to explicitly spell out what is harmful, the audience can see for themselves. The likely target audience of this advertisement is parents/caregivers of children as they are usually the ones who indulge their children in these devices, which results in their children’s addiction to these gaming devices. Due to the authority of parents, it is also assumed that they have the ability to remove such harmful devices from their children’s life.

The power play in this advertisement is between the Health Promotion Board and the parents/caregivers, who are supposedly the target audience. The Health Promotion Board, being a government body, is seen to be more knowledgeable in this particular domain than the general public, thus when they are trying to appeal to the parents/ caregivers to take care of their children’s eyes, their message is given in the form of a warning. This can be seen from the prominent use of imperatives in the text.

It seems like the text is genuinely based on the interests of the children as they are the pillars of the nation, therefore, their general health and even possible addiction to gaming (which is seen as a vice here) will affect the productivity of the country in future.

Critical reading activities (Sec 2 students)


Firstly, to start off a critical reading session with this target audience, the selection of the everyday text(s) must be one that is relevant and of interest to them. We also recall the concept of ‘hybridity’ in our selection of the texts. In this case, three texts bearing messages of anti-drug abuse have been selected. They were selected because the intention and message of the writer of these texts have been made known in secondary schools but in different modes (usually in the form of speeches or presentations). It would then be interesting for the students to decode and make meaning of these texts that are presented in a different form.

It is clearly shown that these texts bear a resemblance to some children narratives that are sold in the bookstores. A possible interpretation could be that children narratives have always been seen as fairytales/far-fetched stories, imaginative etc. Basically, these stories do not have an impact or influence on readers. Such thinking could be perceived by many non-drug users these days whereby they think that drug abuse does not concern them or there is no possibility that they could be one. However, this text, with the type of words and semantic structure seem to suggest otherwise. It gives the possibility that anyone could be a drug user, and when you are one, the good life you had previously would be gone. The names and characters portrayed by the images bears relation to anyone who shares the same lifestyle as the characters mentioned.

The critical reading model that was mentioned above could be used to help the students critically read this message as they seek to learn their roles as a code breaker, text participant, text user and text analyst. The teacher first introduces what each element of competence entails and uses simpler texts to illustrate. Next, for the actual activity of the above selected texts, the ‘Jigsaw’ approach could be used. The students can be grouped into the respective four competencies to discuss what the text means in each element of competency. Next, the four groups are re-grouped to form smaller groups which comprises of a member of each competency group. They can then, together, form their interpretation or meaning of the text.

Some questions that the students may ask when they are in their element of competency group are:

• What message does the image gives?
• What genre of text is this text similar to? Why does the writer choose to use this similarity? What message is he trying to bring across through this similarity?
• What is your first impression of this text?
• Does the intended message of this text match the first –impression of this text? What is the meaning and reason behind this mis-match?
• What is being foregrounded and backgrounded in the texts?
• What kind of function do the words in the text do?

Comments for Jess...

5:49 AM

However, Gutierrez's concept of hybridity highlights that in the midst of having tensions or conflicts between hybrid language practices (E.g. Different languages that children bring to class), we should actually recognise and make use of these tensions and conflicts to create 'third spaces', which are compared to Zygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development--> Used to describe a child's ability to do certain tasks with help or assistance. The essence of these 'third spaces' is that there will be bridging between home and school, especially for children from non-mainstream homes.

Here's a summary of what I understood from Gee and Gutierrez's articles...

8:14 AM

1)Typolution



Inspired by Natalie, I went on to search for more videos on typography and I came across so many interesting productions! This is one of my favourite ones as it has some educational meaning to it. This video uses mixed logics (time-based and space-based) to incorporate letters, illustrations, music and animation, in order to bring across the message of saving the environment. There was a clever use of music to dramatize the whole animation and at the same time, letters were chosen based on their forms to match the things that they signify.

I would think that the affordance of using simple black and white in the video is to show the seriousness of the issue and that it should not be taken lightly.

In terms of the music used, it started off with a rather slow and soft music, which got quicker after a while. To me, it represents the slow pace of life before and how it increased its speed with industralisation + globalisation + technological advances.


Lastly, I feel that the blurring of the fallen petals at the end of the video represents how we are destroying our environment to the extent that it is fading away before our very eyes.

This is all the analysis I have for this video. What else can you think of?


2) NEmation: Mingle with Lingo

This is a very entertaining video that I first saw on TVmobile and I found the mixed media very interesting. The video was created by a group of students in Crescent Girls' School for the NEmation competition. Through this competition, youths can express their notions on Total Defence through animation.

The fonts of this video are based on a ransom note effect (Wikipedia: The result of using an excessive number of juxtaposed typefaces) in typography while the other images and characters are mainly made up of collages. This video again uses mixed logics in conveying the relationship between the various Coffee Shop Lingo and the drinks they represent.

The very first greeting that says "Hey Singaporeans" striked me as trying to appeal to locals due to the deliberate 'Singlish' pronunciation of the word, 'Singaporeans' as 'Singapoleans' (/sɪŋ gə pɔ lɪənz/). Besides the initial 'Singlish' pronunciation, the rest of the commentary totally omitted the 'Singlish' pronunciation. This I feel, was trying to reflect the more educated new generation trying to preserve the Singapore culture and striving to be true blue Singaporeans.

Besides the commentator's voice, there were sound effects throughout the video to add a touch of humour. In addition to the sound effects, the multi-coloured letters as well as the characters' comical movements leaves a smile on viewers' faces. It seems to me that viewers will be easily captured by such use of humour and the informality of the message. (I'm one of them!)

In the section where the phrase "Dai Ga Ho" was screened, characters of different ethnicity came together to recite the phrase. In my opinion, this creates the effect of inclusion for people of all ethnicities in doing their parts for Total defence.

The last message in the video, "Lim (Hokkien for 'drink') our Milo, learn our Lingo" makes use rhyming words to make their message catchy. The everyday lingo was incorporated here to again reinforce their message of appealing to the true blue Singaporeans in Total Defence.

To end off, here's a list of videos that I found really interesting that you can try to analyse for the interaction of their mode, logics and affordances. Enjoy!

1. Words Animation
   
   
   
2. Text Animation 2
   
   
   
3. I Love NY: Type in motion
   
   
   
4. Les Animateurs: The Singapore symphony
   
   
   

10:42 PM

8:02 AM