Reimagining Transcultural Literacy Pedagogies: Thresholds of Possibility Michelle A. Honeyford, PhD University of Manitoba •
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What is meaningful pedagogy in a time of transcultural cosmopolitanism? How can we reimagine literacy pedagogies to include notions of transcultural practices, multimodal epistemologies, and multilingual forms of communication? In what ways can research theory and methods align with reimagining pedagogies? These three questions inspire possibilities for literacy research and pedagogy that are ontologically and epistemologically nimble and multi-­‐faceted, sensitive to local contextual differences, yet also relevant globally in the midst of immense technological, demographic, and geopolitical changes. In this brief paper, I offer several examples of transcultural literacy pedagogy as imagined by K-­‐12 teachers and myself through an inquiry into artifactual literacies (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010, 2011), multimodal composing (Miller & McVee, 2012), and postcolonial and creative pedagogies (Donald, 2009; James, Dobson, Leggo, 2013) in the context of a graduate course in language and literacyi. In these examples, theory and practice are “plugged in” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to one another, creating new thresholds for meaningful pedagogy, theory, and research in a time of transcultural cosmopolitanism. “Back Talk” Ruth Cuthand is a Saskatchewan Cree artist whose work “talks back” to colonial white settler discourses and speaks for Aboriginal identity and rights. Her “Back Talk” exhibit and talk at a local gallery offered an opportunity to explore her art—crude pencil drawings, paintings, photographs, and beadwork—as an artifactual catalyst for critical pedagogy. In class, we transmediated our written responses to the exhibit (e.g., poetry, reflective essays) into other art forms (e.g., charcoal drawings, mixed media, photographs, performative art), collectively probing the difficult topics that confronted us in Cuthand’s work—racism, genocide, the well-­‐intentioned “white liberal woman.” We discussed how art/artifact acts as resistance, speaking to power in critical ways, drawing attention to issues of abuse and violence. We explored connections to arts-­‐
based research and language arts pedagogy, acknowledging how infrequently we utilize the arts and multimodality to expand the ways of knowing we value in the classroom. Together, we considered how our own experience emphasized the need to understand learning as ontoepistemological, “too often missing and…desperately needed” in our diverse classrooms—knowledge that grows “at the intersection between things and people,….experiences and bodies” (Tuana, as cited in Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 118). The Birch Bark Canoe The Birch Bark Canoe documentary and curriculum guide explore the birch bark canoe as an Indigenous technological achievement and a work of art. With the author of the Thresholds of Possibility 2 curriculum guide as our guest, we explored the process of collaborating across disciplines to develop curriculum that gives “due justice to the Indigenous people[s] of this land and…repatriate[s] their role as guides and teachers” (Production Team, n.p.). In the documentary, the birch bark canoe is compared to 21st century innovations in design, demonstrating why the ancient vessel persists even today as the perfect technology, one that “continues to teach us.” In this example, the birch bark canoe is an artifactual catalyst for a trans-­‐disciplinary, transcultural, and holistic approach to curriculum, with the purpose of learning “about each other and ourselves” within a postcolonial understanding of education “as an interconnected, living process in which we all play a part” (Broderick, n.p.). The birch bark canoe inspired our own quest: to explore an artifact (or set of related artifacts) as an inquiry into the creative and critical possibilities of the material and multimodal for expanding curriculum and pedagogy. For teachers and researchers very familiar with the provincial curriculum, the challenge echoed Greene’s notion of the “social imagination in action”—the capacity to “see and value what is ‘not yet’ and work to bring it into being” (Cimino & Apple, 2004, n.p.). Figure 1 provides a snapshot of the artifactual catalysts that inspired the teachers’ transcultural pedagogical work. Figure 1. Artifactual Catalysts for Imagining Transcultural Pedagogies Dalahäst Minecraft Architext High-­‐heel shoes Artifactual Catalysts “Storm over Marvel Lake” Jack Pine Novel Objects Dance The Dalahäst A high school social studies teacher who teaches courses in Canadian history and global issues, Tim Beyak chose as his artifactual catalyst the Dala horse, the national symbol of Thresholds of Possibility 3 Sweden. The Dalahäst is ubiquitous in the Swedish cultural landscape—its history, place, and the habitus of its people—a momento for tourists, an art form, a toy, and an heirloom collectible. Tim explored the significance of the Dalahäst through a fusion text (Evans, 2013), a multimodal, multigenre text designed to merge features from comics, picture books, and other text types. Tim’s nonlinear text included his own drawings, clips from short film and television, emails with Swedish Dalähast makers and enthusiasts, family photos, stories, picture books, and music. The result is a text of curricular invitations—“windows and mirrors” that reflect Tim’s cultural background, but also offer new opportunities to explore difference. The inquiry demonstrates the possibilities of place-­‐based pedagogy, with disciplinary ties to history, art, folklore, and language; of narrative inquiry through family stories, letters, photos, and artifacts; of research and language arts and literacy practices that are authentic, process-­‐driven, creative and purposeful—a model of interest-­‐driven learning connected to community and culture. The Mighty Jack Pine David Beyer, a middle school English Language Arts (ELA) and Social Studies teacher, took us to the Amisk Trail in Whiteshell Provincial Park (MB) to explore “the mighty Jack Pine” as an artifact of the natural environment, reminding us that “artifacts are imbued with meaning when human hands craft them, but also when human beings conceptualize them as storied aspects of their world” (Donald, 2009, p. 542). The tree—
and related issues of sustainability, connection to the land, the protection of natural resources, and land rights—inspires a curriculum of Indigenous métissage bringing “Aboriginal place-­‐stories to bear on public policy discussions in educational contexts in appropriate and meaningful ways” (Donald, 2009, p. 542). Through his experience with the tree and the trail (portrayed through a multimedia assemblage of his photographs, research and the music of Neil Young), David explores reflection as “a form of deep thought, emerging in conditions of solitude and slowness, in which the mind engages in a synthesizing process that tends to produce original ideas, insights and perspectives” (Rose, 2013, p. 107). This is thinking for thinking’s sake: cultivated through balance and un-­‐structure, antithetical to a curriculum of measurable outcomes, offering instead to bring about wellness, mindfulness, and balance. This is a form of reflection that inspires us to contemplate, create, and make connections, to ground inquiry, critical thinking, and social justice. These are the goals of an ecological pedagogy, which David designs through a three-­‐pronged approach: understanding the significance of the artifact, its threats, and its protection. Dance Amanda Borton, a grade one teacher, began her inquiry into dance as a “living artifact” by inviting two students in her school—a Jingle dancer and a Punjabi dancer—to be featured in her documentary video. By lunchtime, six students arrived at her door, eager to be part of the “dance project.” By the end of the day, two more students came to ask if they could be involved. Amanda had effectively communicated to students that she valued their cultural identities; she saw in dance the possibility of a different kind of Thresholds of Possibility 4 storytelling—told through the music, movement, and traditional dress. As the student who dances the “Jingle Dance” explains, the dance tells the story of healing: “a little girl was sick and her grandpa made her a dress, and the first time she went around the circle she couldn’t even stand up, so she went [around the circle] with him. The next time, she got stronger, and the last time she didn’t need any help, so she got stronger by dancing.” The design of circles (to which the Jingles are attached) on the traditional dress her mother has made for her, contribute to telling the story, for “each element in the dance is considered an important piece of its language” (Provenzo, 2011). Manitoba has—as part of the arts curriculum—a dance curriculum that acknowledges that “Dance education is important for preserving and nurturing human culture and heritage” (Manitoba Education, 2011, p. 2). Yet, Amanda explains that she, like most teachers, “check the box on the visual arts component instead.” In a presentation that included instruction in Japanese dance, Amanda challenged us to consider what would happen if “teachers incorporated dance literacy” across the curriculum; “if students could use another literacy to engage in and share”; and if “dance literacy were privileged as much as traditional literacies?” Storm over Marvel Lake While Kelly Fewer, a high school ELA teacher, provides opportunities for students to choose the books they read, she believes “an important part of my role is to expose students to literature, including Canadian Literature, which is often undervalued in our classrooms in favour of canonized texts like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye.” She also argues that educators are doing their students “a disservice” if we don’t “encourage a critical stance toward visual representations” (Begoray, 2013, p. 106). Thus, Kelly chose the oil painting “Storm over Marvel Lake” by Canadian artist Donald Flather as a catalyst for connections to Canadian Literature. She imagined a curriculum around this visual artifact that would engage students in: 1) learning to read a visual text; 2) making meaning by moving across the visual and written texts—as well as music and artifacts (transmediation); 3) exploring the contemporary and historical experiences of Canadians with the landscape and climate as a theme of Canadian literature and art; and 4) making connections to other media and to their own sense of Canadian identity. In a multimodal text, Kelly provides numerous “places to go” in helping students understand and see the connections between visual art, short story, film, and essay. She invites students to explore Canadian identity through these art forms, but also through pop culture, and ultimately, through artifacts they select themselves. Novel artifacts A high school ELA teacher, Chas Findlay explored how to incorporate artifacts as a catalyst for understanding dystopian societies in a unit on dystopian literature. Chas created a gallery of found, commercial, home-­‐made, and pop culture artifacts, which she invited us to touch, smell, play with, and talk about. Through writing (post-­‐its) and conversation, we hypothesized the possible connections of the artifacts to a list of features she provided: a tyrannical leader/worshipped figurehead; society created as a result of war, apocalypse, natural disaster, or revolution; unfairness or inequity between Thresholds of Possibility 5 social classes; conformity regulated through fear and control; a defiant/dissatisfied protagonist who rebels; and the use of propaganda to control citizens. Chas helped us see the capacity of artifacts to cross time and s/place, to help us move between the real the imagined, to build a sense of community identity as readers through our talk about books, and to value others’ ideas through listening. Deepening readers’ understandings and connections to literature, culture, place, and time through “novel artifacts” suggests possibilities for designing “novel galleries” (in schools and/or online), where students tag, archive, and curate media and artifacts to support their own and others’ engagement with books. High-­‐heeled shoes Judy Amy-­‐Penner, a former early years teacher, is a mother, blogger, graduate student, poet, and artist interested in gender and education. Judy took as her artifactual catalyst high-­‐heeled shoes. Through an installation that put us eye-­‐level with high-­‐heeled shoes—selected to create a variety in colour, shape, texture, materials, design—and texts about high-­‐heeled shoes, Judy challenged us to imagine and contemplate. In her artist statement, she described the questions that informed the process of designing the installation: “How could I present my artifact in a way that sparked inquiry? How could I give the shoe the movement through time and space that it deserved? The answer was to suspend the shoe from the ceiling to create movement akin to walking. In this way, viewers could walk among the shoes and would be able to see them from all angles.” In merging theory and practice, Judy reminded us that “the first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interest, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, as cited in James, Dobson, & Leggo, 2012, p. 131). Judy’s installation cultivated our curiosity and interest by elevating high-­‐heeled shoes visually from the floor to the ceiling, by making them available to walk around in, and by approaching the phenomenon of high heels through texts that offered new lenses (e.g., sociological, historical, cultural, feminist, and mathematical) for seeing and understanding the shoe’s significance. Judy also traced the shoe from inception through fabrication (through a video with designer Tracey Neuls) to our own lived experiences with high-­‐heeled shoes. The installation effectively engaged us in pedagogy that embraced feminist principles: reformation of the relationship between professor and student, empowerment, building community, privileging voice, respecting the diversity of personal experience, and challenging traditional pedagogical notions (Webb, Allen, and Walker, 2002). Minecraft Architext Damian Purdy, a middle school ELA and outdoor education teacher, shared a three-­‐
week “inquiry-­‐animated multimodal project” he did with his Grade 8 ELA students. Damian described the project as “concerned with architecture as a catalyst for rich ELA learning experiences. That is, how buildings can supersede an essentially material, in-­‐
place nature and instead come to be considered as a symbolic medium through which ideas, beliefs, and identities are enacted and expressed.” His own inquiry as a practitioner was guided by three questions: 1) Can a building be read as a text? 2) Can Thresholds of Possibility 6 Grade 8 students use architecture to explore symbolism? 3) What are the “constellation of literacy activities” (Black & Steinkuehler, 2009) that video games invite? Damian began the inquiry with the idea of reading a building as a text, a way to bring “everyday material experience…into the meaning-­‐making enterprise” (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012). The building was the home of his friends, who designed and built the home themselves. The stories and photographs his friends shared in the interview were developed by Damian into a short film, which then became an artifactual catalyst in the classroom for his students’ thinking about design, architecture, and symbolism. With the film and other examples of architectural symbolism as “mentor texts,” Damian invited his students to create their own architectural sculptures (with K’Nex) to communicate ideas like “progress” and “impossibility.” With their growing understandings of symbolism and architecture, the Grade 8 students worked on “written blueprints” for their own building—using the “appropriate signal words and textual cues” (i.e., discourse) to convey the details of their architectural designs. In an effort to “disrupt conventional notions of literacy” (Sanford & Merkel, 2013, p. 119), Damian sought a way for students to transmediate their written texts into structures—and thus, brought Minecraft into the classroom. The challenge for students was then to build from the written blueprints of their peers. This added “another layer of meaning making to the process” as students had to read closely and carefully, transmediating words into architecture. As a result, Damian reflected, the “finished multimodal pieces displayed evidence of richer, more immersive, learning experiences.” The project became a “long-­‐term, process-­‐based activity,” one that engendered “problems to be solved [that develop progressively] into a final and successful completion rather than short, one-­‐off worksheet assignments” (Sanford and Markel, 2013, p. 120). Through Damian’s presentation, we too, realized that meaningful pedagogy (in this case, inspired by architecture and symbolism) generates authentic literacy practices: “writing, reading, expression, organization, collaboration, comprehension, visual and textual parsing, creative thinking, interpretation, problem-­‐solving, and an understanding of self and others. In sum, a ‘constellation of literacies’” (Purdy, Artist Statement). For Further Discussion With these examples in mind, we might return to the three questions posed—not to find the answers, but to cut “into the center, opening it up to see what newness might be incited” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, “Methodology,” para. 4). These examples compel us as literacy educators and researchers to consider what Barad and other material feminist and posthumanist researchers argue is necessary: a performative understanding of discursive practices that moves from constructing knowledge through signification and representation to “matters of practices/doings/actions” that “bring to the forefront important questions of ontology, materiality, and agency” (Barad, 2003, p. 802).
References Amy-­‐Penner, J. (2015). Shoes: A suspension of the status quo. Using art installations as a springboard for artifactual inquiry. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801-­‐ 831. Begoray, D. (2013). Why should we teach visual literacy? In K. James, T. Dobson, & C. Leggo (Eds.). English in middle and secondary classrooms: Creative and critical advice from Canada’s teacher educators (pp. 105-­‐109). Toronto: Pearson. Beyak, T. (2015). The dalahäst: A catalyst of artifactual literacy for learning and exploring identity as represented through fusion text. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Beyer, D. (2015). The jack pine artifact: The natural environment as an artifact. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Black, R. W., & Steinkuehler, C. (2009). Literacy in visual worlds. In L. Christenbury, R. Bomer, & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Handbook of adolescent literacy research (pp. 271-­‐286). New York: Guilford. Borton, A. (2015). Storytelling through dance. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Broderick, P. (nd). The birch bark canoe: Navigating a new world—21st century curriculum connections and video resource for Manitoba teachers (Grades 5-­‐9). Cimino, Jr. J., & Apple, K. (2004). Imagination, education, and social change: Interview with philosopher Maxine Greene. The Learning Arts: Interdisciplinary arts-­‐based learning for students and teachers. Downloaded from http://learningarts.org/news/2004-­‐6/greene.htm Donald, D. (2009). Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining decolonization of Aboriginal-­‐Canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1-­‐24. Evans, J. (2013). From comics, graphic novels and pictures books to fusion texts: a new Thresholds of Possibility kid on the block!. International Journal of Primary, Elementary, and Early Years Education, 41(2), 233-­‐248. 8 Fewer, K. (2015). Connecting Canadian Art: An exploration of identity. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Findlay, C. (2015). Exploring elements of dystopian society in The Hunger Games: An inquiry into artifactual literacies and multimodal composing. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. New York: Routledge. James, K., Dobson, T., Leggo, C. (2013). English in middle and secondary classrooms: Creative and critical advice from Canada’s teacher educators. Toronto: Pearson. Manitoba Education. (2011). Manitoba curriculum framework of outcomes. Kindergarten to Grade 8. Dance. Miller, S., & Mc Vee, M. (2012). Multimodal composing in classrooms. New York: Routledge. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story. New York: Teachers College Press. Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2011). Artifactual critical literacy: A new perspective for literacy education. Berkeley Review of Education, 2(2), p. 129-­‐151. Purdy, D. (2015). Architext: 407 duboc street, symbolism, and minecraft. Presented in Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts, EDUB 7120. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba. Production team (nd). Insert. The birch bark canoe: Navigating a new world—21 century curriculum connections and video resource for Manitoba teachers (Grades 5-­‐9). Provenzo, E. F. (2011). Multiliteracies: Beyond text and the written word. Information Age Publishing, Inc. Rose, E. (2013). On reflection: An essay on technology, education, and the status of thought in the twenty-­‐first century. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Sanford, K., & Markel, L. (2013). How can video games support literacy skills for youth? Thresholds of Possibility In K. James, T. Dobson, & C. Leggo (Eds.). English in middle and secondary classrooms: Creative and critical advice from Canada’s teacher educators (pp. 118-­‐122). Toronto: Pearson. Webb, L., Allen, M. W., & Walker, K. L. (2002). Feminist pedagogy: Identifying basic principles. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 1(6), 67-­‐72. i I taught the course, Curricular Issues in Teaching English Language Arts at the University of Manitoba during Winter 2015. 9