Transforming Literacy
Glynda A. Hull
University of California, Berkeley
USA
Keeping Hope Alive
“I believe that in this moment
in our history we have
something of great import
to accomplish by
exercising an optimism of
the intellect in order to
open up ways of thinking
that have for too long
remained foreclosed.”
David Harvey, Spaces of
Hope (2000)
“Just as it looked as if we
were about to lose the
American democratic
experiment—in the face of
civil war, imperial greed,
economic depression, and
racial upheaval—in each
of these periods a
democratic awakening and
activist energy emerged to
keep our democratic
project afloat. We must
work and hope for such an
awakening once again.”
Cornel West, Democracy
Matters (2004)
DUSTY: Digital Underground
Storytelling for You(th)
Community-based technology center operating in
collaboration with university, church, schools
Offering access to and meaningful uses of
information technologies
New technologies that allow multi-media, multimodal literacy
Providing programs for children, youth, adults, and
seniors from community and mentoring
opportunities for students from university
On-going research on participants’ experiences and
center’s role in community
Conceptualizing Diversity
• Racial/Ethnic
• Linguistic
• Socio-Economic
• Generational
• Institutional
• Spatial
• Semiotic
Semiotics (in lieu of Linguistics)
• Speech and writing are still dominant modes of
representation and communication.
• But new media (information technologies) make it
easier to use and combine multiple modes.
• Now we can combine writing, spoken language,
images, moving pictures, gesture, song, dance,
music.
Conceptualizing literacy….
….a familiarity with the full range of
communicative tools, media, and modes (oral,
written, visual, gestural, performative),
….plus an awareness of and a sensitivity to the
power and importance of representation of self
and others,
…along with the space and support to
communicate critically, aesthetically, lovingly,
and agentively
Overview
• Context: Welcome to West Oakland and
DUSTY
• Theories: Identity, Geography, and New
Literacy Studies/Semiotics
• Voices and Literacies from West Oakland
• Conclusions about Language, Literacy, and
Diversity
West Oakland, CA
Educational Reform in the US
Much urban school reform is concerned with
accountability and efficiency, embracing business
practices and values
Can’t solve problems of schools by focusing on
schools alone or just looking within schools, and
ignoring poverty, legacies of racism, and
economic climates
Other models: Community “Development” (e.g.,
Kevin Johnson’s St. Hope Academy in Oak Park,
California)
Universities as Responsible to Local Communities
DUSTY: Digital Underground
Storytelling for You(th)
• After-School Programs DST & Homework
Programs for Elementary-Age Children and
Middle School Youth
• Evening Digital Visual Programs for Older
Youth/Young Adults
• Digital Music Program
• Adult Classes/Workshops
• Intergenerational Oral History Projects
• After-School Programs at School Sites in
Collaboration with Teachers, Administrators
Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement
Perspectives from Theory
• Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Identity and
the Ethnography of Personhood
• Cultural Geography: The Experience and
Representation of Space and Place
• New Literacy Studies and Semiotics:
Multi-Media and Multi-Modality
Identity as…
…enacted through and mediated by language and
other cultural artifacts;
…amalgamated from past experiences, available
cultural resources, and possible subject positions
in the present and future;
…indexing social positions or one’s privilege or lack
thereof in relation to that of others;
…inseparable from learning and especially mastery
or the acquisition of expertise;
…continuously revised; and
…articulated through story or narrative.
A Tellable Self
Selves, like cultures, are not so much preserved in
stories as they are created, reworked, and revised
through participation in everyday narrative
practices that are embedded in and responsive to
shifting interpersonal conditions. Memories of
self and other provide a constantly updated
resource that narrators exploit in projecting
tellable and interpretable selves” (Miller, 1995, pp.
175-176).
At DUSTY, participants….
…use multi-media, multi-modality to articulate
pivotal moments in their lives and reflect on life
trajectories.
…by means of these technologies and modalities and
social practices, reposition themselves as agents in
and authors of their own lives.
How Place/Space Shape Identity
• Residential segregation in US as a means of
creating racial identities
• Design and control of space as a means of
constructing youth culture
“From being able to have a room of one’s own (at
least in richer families) to hanging out on
particular corners, to clubs where only your own
age group goes, the construction of spatiality can
be an important element in building a social
identity.” (Doreen Massey, 2002)
Social Spaces, Social Relationships, and
Symbolic Resources
“An analysis of the
production of social space
is an analysis of the
production of social
relationships, implying an
emphasis upon
relationships of power that
are articulated across
material and symbolic
resources.”
(Leander, 2002)
Youth from the community,
undergraduates, and a graduate student
collaborate at DUSTY
Literal and Figurative Notions of
Space at DUSTY
• Importance of safe space physically
• Importance of social and physical space which
invites equal access to symbolic and material
resources
• Importance of social and physical space which
arranges collaboration across diversities, but
which cultural/ethnic/age-specific groups can
“claim”
• Importance of conceptions of space and activity
that are both local and global
Multi-Literacies (New London
Group, 1996)
Increasing salience of cultural and linguistic
diversity
Multiplicity of communication channels and
media--which differ according to culture
and context, and which have different
affordances
Multi-Media, Multi-Modality
“…there are now choices about how what is to be
represented should be represented: in what mode,
in what genre, in what ensembles of modes and
genres on what occasions” (G. Kress, Literacy in
the New Media Age, 2003, p. 117)
Literacy…. Choosing among and using available
technologies, media, and modalities for expression
and communication
The Pictoral Turn
(W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994)
Ours is an age in which the pictoral turn has
supplanted the linguistic one, as images push
words off the page and our lives becomes
increasingly mediated by a popular visual culture.
Distinctive contrasts to the primarily linguistic texts
and the forms of textual reasoning that
predominate in schools and universities
Sustained attention to the visual isn’t a customary
part of schools’ literacy curricula, and in fact,
there is much ambivalence toward it in the US
Voices and Literacies from
West Oakland
• Lyfe-N-Rhyme: Randy’s Critique of Life
and Times in West Oakland, California and
the USA
• Taj’s “Delicate Man” Animation
• Cristina’s Journal
• From India to Oakland and Back Again
• Mo’s “In Memorium”
• Undergraduates Reflect on Being Volunteers
Introducing Randy
• Speaker of AAVE, fluid code-switcher
• High school leaver
• Didn’t write in school, but wrote a lot outside of
school: mostly raps
• Required to attend a vocational IT program in lieu
of being incarcerated
• Works at a warehouse during day; cares for son in
the evening
• Talented musician, loyal son, social critic, poet
Interview Excerpt: Randy and Job Hunting
“Frustrated Soul” came from job hunting…. From me
being frustrated, turning in application after
application. I was working a job at a card board place
right there on 8th (Street), and I had 90-day probation,
so on my 90th day, I passed the probation. On my 91st
day they laid me off….They said “you’ll be back in
like two weeks”. They didn’t call me back for like a
month and a half. I quit my City of Oakland job for
this job. So then they called me back a month and a
half later, letting me work for a week, then they laid
me off for 4 more months. Then I get a letter that I’m
terminated. You know what I’m saying?” (Interview,
10/31/02)
DUSTY as Pathway
It made a way for me to put this stuff [creative bent,
his musical talent in particular] to use, so I can be
here [inside his apartment] and not miss anything. I
can do what I want to do. I don’t have to be in the
street. It [the opportunity to be in DUSTY] was like
right on time.” Because that was when the murder
rate was getting high. My partner got killed around
the corner, another one around here. And it just took
me off the street. … And it gave me a chance to use
my creativity and tell my story.
(Interview, 10/31/02)
“Lyfe-N-Rhyme”
• Two-minute video narrated by Randy,
performing his original poem/rap
• Miles Davis tune as background music
• Illustrates, complements, or otherwise
accompanies the words and music with
approximately 80 images
• No visual transitions, such as fading
QuickTime™ and a
Sorenson Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
What’s Powerful about
Lyfe-n-Rhyme?
• Striking visuals, many of them photographs
taken by Randy
• Rhythm, prose/poetry
• Word plus beat
• Images paired with words
• Social critique
• Representation of self as agent
Literate Art of Digital Stories
Recontexualiation of Images (cf. Bauman & Briggs)
Randy “decenters” famous figures, like the Sphinx
and Tupac and Marcus Garvey, removing them
from their particular historical contexts, and
recenters them, recontextualing them in his own
creative universe of this digital story and his own
social world of Oakland, California.
Mixed Media/Modalities
All media are mixed, but have different sensory and
semiotic ratios. (Seeing itself is not a visual
medium, but rather, is always engaged with other
sensory channels.) (W.T.J. Mitchell, 2004)
We can ask of multi-media/multi-modal texts: What
sense activates or leads another? How do such
texts afford the “braiding” of signs and senses? To
what semiotic, aesthetic, and emotional effects?
Dimensions & Possibilities of Digital Stories
(with thanks to Ochs & Capps, Living Narratives:
Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, 2001)
Synesthesia
Modes Tightly
Integrated
Modes Loosely
Integrated
Appropriation/
Recontextualization
Of Found Images
Images Altered
Physically and/or
Conceptually
Images
Adopted As Is
Positionality of
Storyteller
More Agentive
Stance
Emotionality
High Impact
Low Impact
Addressivity
Addressed to
Broad Audience
Addressed to
Particular People
Agentive Stance
not Apparent
Randy’s “Lyfe-n-Rhme”:
Realization of Semiotic Possibilities
Synesthesia
Music, words, images braided together
Appropriation/
Recontextualization
Of Found Images
Found images altered physically and
conceptually
Positionality of
Storyteller
Agentive authorial stance
Emotionality
High Impact
Addressivity
Addressed to broad audience
Interview Excerpts
Synesthesia: “I make the beat too, and a beat like that, it’s
good vibrations, but some of the pictures are about
homeless people, you see beer cans, heroin needles.”
Recontextualization: “So that’s just taking a regular billboard
and shaving off the things that they’re promoting and
focusing more on what they’re saying.”
Addressivity: “It’s cool ‘cause I can get somebody to listen to
me.”
Kids, Too! Taj the Animator
• 9 years old; African American and East Indian
heritage
• “I don't like my neighborhood because people
hang by the liquor store and talk loud all night.”
• Got in some fights and was picked on; kids
bombarded him with the dodge ball
• Loved techno music, science fiction, super hero
stories; wanted to be an animator
“Delicate Man”:
The Vulnerable Super Hero
• Imaginary character, “Delicate Man,”
• Events that took place at DUSTY
• How the super hero got his powers:
accidentally put into a scientist’s mutating
machine and cut into pieces
• Super powers: he falls apart!
• 42 images drawn in PhotoShop
• Composed his own digital music
QuickTime™ and a
Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Taj, the Delicate Boy
• Didn’t enjoy or do well at school, but didn’t miss a
day at DUSTY
• Had trouble writing, but dictated easily; performed
his typed text
• Clearly understood and exploited the genre of
super hero stories
• Developed socially at DUSTY, making friends
• Penchant for science fiction, superheroes meshed
with available technological means
Process Dimensions and Possibilities
Leading
Modalities
Oral
Story
CoConstruction
Solo
Discovery of
New
Perspectives
Positionality
Unhanged
Positionality
Changed
Appropriation
of Technology
Requires Steady
Assistance
Works More
Independently
Effect on Teller Little
Effect
Written
Story
Images
Joint
Enjoyment
Music
Multiple
Revelation
Authorial Agency
Catharsis
Bilingual kids, too,
like Dr. Cristina
• 7 year-old in 3rd grade whose family had
immigrated from El Salvador
• Soft-spoken and quiet, she used the opportunity to
share her writing as a chance to elaborate orally.
• Fluent in Spanish, she tolerated her older brother’s
attempts to help her find the words she wanted in
English and to correct her facts.
• First digital story was entirely in English, but her
second was done partly in Spanish.
QuickTime™ and a
Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
“Performing Agentive Identities through
Multimedia Composing: A Case Study
of Selina” by Mira-Lisa Katz (2004)
• 12-yr.-old English/Spanish bilingual born in
the US to parents from El Salvador
• Shifting attitudes toward Spanish
• Linguistic trajectory: preferences for public
and privates uses of 1st and 2nd language
shift over time
• After-school as a space for enacting
multilingual self
Case Studies: Chris, a
Cambodian-American 5th Grader
“’When I Went Fishing’:
How a Cambodian
Boy in an African
American Community
Crosses Cultural
Boundaries through
Digital Storytelling”
--Jean Yonemura Wing
(2004)
QuickTime™ and a
Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Exchanging Cultures:
From India to California
• In 2000 Dr. Urvashi Sahni installed a computer in
Madantoosi Village, U.P. , India, powered by solar
panels.
• Later developed and provided software in Hindi in
science
• Involved teachers and students in software
production
• Digital story exchange initiated with DUSTY in
2002
QuickTime™ and a
DV - NTSC decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Translation from Hindi
“This is our village Madantoosi. This is our school
and we all study in it happily. This is our
Panchayat house (council home). There are many
animals in our village—like goats, cows, calves,
and bulls. There is a lake in our village and a hand
pump. This is a man selling clothes on a cycle
(there are no shops in villages). And this is our
Pradhan’s (village headman’s) house.”
(The children added that “the Pradhan’s house is the
largest house in the village. He has a tractor, 2
motorcycles, and a grinding machine, electricity,
and a phone. We all look like we belong to him in
this picture.”)
QuickTime™ and a
Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Genres and Purposes
• Autobiographical
Narratives
• Descriptions of
Place/Neighborhood
• Poems/Raps
• Social Critique/PSA
• Re-enactments of
Cartoons, Comics,
Movies, Video Games
• Reports, Biographies,
Interviews
• Offer a tribute to Family
Members, Friends
• Represent/Interpret a
Pivotal Moment/Key
Event
• Represent Community
and/or Community
History
• Create Art/Artifact
• Play/Fantasize
• Heal/Grieve/Reflect
• Reach/Inform/Influence
Wider Audience
Mo’s Grief
Well one thing about it, when I came to Dusty, I hadn’t cried,
which is something I don’t do [Mm] I never cry and the uh
you know at each meeting, when I would come, it was like
a relief valve every time I came….I got stronger, and the
valve got lighter, you know. It’s like pressure.. And less
pressure and less pressure and then I finally got really
comfortable and as I got comfortable I named Michael the
Angle and I named Glynda the Good Witch because of the
way I felt was that at that time in my life that’s what God
had sent to me…..I needed a way to express my grief. I
needed a way to accept my grief and my story and I also
needed to know that even though it was going to be a hard
time, you could make new friends, you could have new
acquaintances and you know that you’re not so low.
There’s always, you know it’s like God has closed the
door, slammed it in my face and when I came to Dusty, I
found out that He opened a window so that I would go
have a way out.
Digital Stories about
Pop Culture Icons
“My name is Damisie, and I’m 21 years old
and my favorite rapper of all time is Tupac
Shakur. Since I was ten years old I’ve been
listening to his music....I looked at Tupac as
being a role model. He inspired me to
become anything I want to be.”
New Directions: Digital Music
People who write about curriculum and instruction
usually ignore the role of popular culture in the
production of identities among youth. And even
when work is done on popular culture, it’s often
on visual media and not popular music. This
despite the fact “music is…at the epicenter of
practices of discursive identity formation for the
young.” (p. 2)
—Cameron McCarthy et al. (1999). Sound identities:
Popular music and the cultural politics of
education.
Music and Identity Formation
“So powerful is the desire to make music with
others that one is tempted to conceive of musicmaking as an emergent, radical engagement with
consciousness; an engagement which can ‘rattle’
the hegemony of everyday life and open up the
possibility of a common ground where differences
might meet, mingle, and engage one another” (p.
447).
—Glenn M. Hudak. (1999). The ‘sound’ identity:
Music-making and schooling.
Research Questions
• What are the affordances of multi-media, multimodal genres and composing environments? What
is the relationship between digital storytelling
print-based literacy?
• What identities are fostered through access to the
digital media, social relationships, and contexts for
learning at a community technology center?
• What constitutes “development,” for different
individuals and groups, for the institutions, and for
the community?
Types of Data
• Participant Observation
Field Notes
• Formal/Informal
Interviews
• Multi-Media Artifacts
• Print-based literacy
Artifacts
• Video and Audio
Recordings
• Pre/Post Skills
Inventories
• Pre/Post Surveys
• Standardized Test
Scores for Matched
Sample Comparisons
• Service
hours/Demographics
What We’ve Learned
• Power and ability of children, youth, adults,
and seniors as multi-media, multi-modal
creators
• Power of alternative spaces for
learning/identity development
• Power of multiple media, multiple modes
for communication, expression, and
meaning-making
Pedagogy/Participant Structures
Vygotskian concept of
the “zone of proximal
development”-assisting learner in doing
something that she
can’t yet do on her
own
Interplay of Emotion, Cognition,
and Human Action
Vygotsky’s vision of “a dynamic
system of meaning” in which
“the affective and the
intellectual unite” (Thought &
Language, 1986, p. 10)
Dewey’s call for “fusion of
intellectual and the emotional,
of meaning and value” (How
We Think, 1933, p. 278)
Enacting an Agentive Self
Enacting an agentive self can be pivotal for learning
and motivation.
Conversely, the opportunity to be successful as a
learner and doer can foster a view of self as agent,
able to influence present circumstances and future
possibilities, and to situate self in relation to others
in socially responsible ways.
It is such a view of self, and continual opportunities
to enact this self in relation to new skills,
technologies, knowledge, and practices, that is
central for development in both children and
adults.
Aesthetics and Sensoriness
“How might we as educators talk about the aesthetic,
argue for its role in the development of literacy, in
these high-stakes testing and standardizing times?”
How might we as educators deepen our awareness of
the role of the senses in learning as well as be
more attuned to the integration of the material
body and consciousness?
QuickTime™ and a
Cinepak decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Beauty in the Midst of Confusion
Randy: “I said, ‘it’s rough out here, yeah that
you can bet, but I guess there’s 2 sides to
every sunset.’ So on the one side there’s all
this confusion, which symbolizes to me the
government, and then you’ve got all these
wires going across. But in the midst of all
that there’s still all this beauty, right there.”
Shirley Brice Heath,
“Seeing our Way into Learning”
“The swirl of verbal, visual and gestural interactions
that proceed out of engagement with multiple
modes of representation ensures development of
abilities to focus, strategise, discern and explicate
components and integrate possibilities through
future scenarios. The future curriculum needs to
integrate visual, verbal and other representational
modes as schools move closer in goals and process
to non-school learning communities and
organizations” (2000, p. 121).
DUSTY as a Learning Space
for Youth and Adults
• Uses of, choices among multiple modes/modalities
and creation and communication of valued cultural
forms
• Bridges connecting traditional literacy, new
literacies, popular culture, academic discourse
• Repeated entry points for participation across time
• Relationships that engender movement and
participation across social contexts
• Multiple opportunities to enact an agentive and
socially responsible self
Cornell West on Academics
Engaging the Larger Culture
“…if I wanted to present a danceable education to
young people in their own idiom I would do so.”
(p. 194)
“My vision of academic engagement
embraces…academic standards of excellence yet
also revels in overcoming the huge distance
between the elite world of the universities, the
young people in the hood, and the democratic
activists who fight for social change.” (p. 199)
—Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against
Imperialism (2004).
Undergraduates:
Our Future Educators
• Enrolled in “American Cultures” course taught in
School of Education on “New Literacies”
• 50-55% Asian American, 30-35% White, 5-10%
Latino/Chicano, 5% African American
• Volunteer 45 hrs a semester in after-school
program
• Research on undergraduate experience:
questionnaires; analysis of their fieldnotes, case
studies
• Final Assignment: “Reflect on the Course But
Don’t Write an Essay!”
• Brad and Lamar: “DUSTY is in between school
and fun.”
Challenges
• Collaboration across diversities
• Making a difference in school
literacies/identities
• Making a difference in job
placement/material circumstance
• Recruitment/outreach
• Spatial organization/rights
• Building/sustaining relationships w/
other organizations and non-profits
• Funding, burn-out
Pippa Stein on “Multimodal Pedagogies”
(in Norton & Toohey, 2004)
“Multimodal pedagogies allow for the expression of
a much fuller range of human emotion and
experience; they acknowledge the limits of
language, admit the integrity of silence, and do not
presume closure.”
“How can the classroom as a space for meaning
making be a complex, hybrid space founded on
diverse histories, multiple modes of
representation, epistemologies, feelings,
languages, and discourses which can become
harnessed for productivity and regenerativity?”
Transforming Literacy
• Move beyond the old dichotomies such as
orality/literacy; personal/analytic; and
cognition/emotion
• Provide access to a diversity of semiotic systems
• Make space for aesthetic uses of language/literacy
along side instrumental ones
• Construct paths to and from popular culture and
academic discourse
• Expect, embrace the hybridity of cultural artifacts
• Cross geographic and social borders literally,
symbolically, and materially
• Position students as agents capable of making
their worlds
~Thank You~
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Randy
Cristina
Taj
Ms. Shannon and Dusty’s Heroes
Children from Madantoosi Village
Students from DUSTY Middle School program
UC Berkeley Undergraduates
Michael Angelo James, DUSTY Co-Founder and
Director
• Glynda Hull, DUSTY Co-Founder
[email protected]
• Michael James, DUSTY Co-Founder and
Director
[email protected]
• Mary Solits, DUSTY Sites Coordinator and
Research Director
[email protected]