The purpose of EDUC 797 Researching New Literacies: Multimodal Media Production and Social Justice

This seminar is for students, faculty, post-docs, etc. interested in how critical media literacies can be used for political, economic and social justice.  The premise that guides the course is that multimodal media production (MMP) engages youth in literacy practices they will need for participating in future academic, civic and social contexts.  A growing body of research documents the development of these multiliteracies across sociocultural contexts in-and-out of school settings however in schools serving historically underserved communities uses for technology are often undefined, under-conceptualized, remedial or non-existent.  This unequal access to the resources and tools of MMP reflect sociohistoric arrangements in society.  Issues of power and powerlessness are central to the course as they illuminate how sociohistoric arrangements are imagined, constructed and challenged. The New London Group’s pedagogy of multiliteracies stressed that students needed instruction in how to use and select from all the available semiotic resources for representation in order to make meaning, while at the same time combining and recombining these resources so as to create possibilities for transformation and reconstruction.  Given the age of digitization we live in we begin with conceptions of literacy as Multimodal Design that afford one or more multi-skilled person to operate different modes using a single interface.  Guided by readings from education, cultural studies, new media studies we will investigate the possibilities for literacy development through the production of wikis, blogs and video for research purposes.  The course considers questions such as:

•    How do we facilitate instruction in historically underserved communities that engages youth in challenging how powerful economic, political and social forces position them?
•    How can educators learn to value, understand and build on the diverse languages, literacies and cultures of their students and a global society while teaching them how to decode the dominant forms of linguistic, academic and culture capital necessary to mount such a challenge?
•    How can MMP be used to organize and mount a challenge to white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy?
•    What literacy practices are involved in MMP?
What spaces are opened up via MMP for young people to project their future/possible selves?