English Education - Volume 40, Issue 1, 2007

The arts, multimodality, and new literacies studies, each with its own distinct principles, together can redefine literacy and what constitutes being literate. To recognize the roles that each of these fields plays in literacy necessitates a cultural shift in reading, interpreting, creating, and responding to a range of multimedia messages. The everyday literacies that learners bring to the classroom blur the lines between traditional literacy and unpredictable literacy, which promotes reading and writing through multimedia to create morphed and altered texts.

The authors believe that teachers who have deep knowledge about different arts disciplines can and should work together to create curriculum that fosters inquiry about life itself rather than the mastery of fragmented knowledge and skills. Fine arts teachers know something different from what ELA teachers know. So curriculum that is thoughtfully planned to make the most of multiple arts disciplines enables students to develop deep emotive intensity, intentionality as learners, and useful insights into human experience.

In this article the authors stress the importance of using interactive Web 2.0 tools within methods courses and practicum sites by reflexively noting how and why these tools function to achieve certain rhetorical purposes and foster constructivist learning.

Suzanne Miller examines the meaning of shifting notions of literacy for English education, drawing on her work in a long-term digital video composing project and in an ELA teacher education class to look at teachers’ engagements with this newly accessible multimodal literacy practice. She argues that English teachers need support for new kinds of embodied multimodal learning in order to be prepared for teaching students in 21st-century classrooms.