Friday, March 13, 2009
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:
This forms the basis of Stein's six main assumptions of multiliteracies, which are as follows:
- Pedagogy is semiotic activity within relations of culture, history and power
- Meaning making is bodily, sensory, and semiotic
- Meaning making is multimodal
- Meaning making is interested action
- Language is limited
- Meaning making is transformation, creativity, and design
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.
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.
Labels: Stein (2004)'s article response
10:57 PM
Jess Chen...
