My thinking has been influenced by work in the New Literacy Studies (NLS) and multimodality. Both are relatively new fields of academic enquiry, developed over the last twenty years, the concepts of which researchers are beginning to
synthesise (Pahl & Roswell, 2006). NLS recognises that (i) texts are multimodal and that (ii) changes in technology are helping many texts become more multimodal than their historic counterparts. The endeavour to synthesise the two fields follows the realisation that there are complementarities between, on the one hand, the idea of literacy as social rather than individualistic practice, and on the other, the idea that meaning can be made through multiple modes, rather than just the written or spoken word – through image, gesture and sound, for example. One identifiable complementarity is the perceived challenge to the dominance of the written word, often through the incorporation of images, still or moving, into texts (Kress, 2003; Jewitt, 2005). Protagonists from both fields agree that it is not
possible to fully understand contemporary texts without an appreciation of multimodality.
A shift towards valuing multimodal texts has enormous potential consequences for students with dyslexia. Many of these students have traditionally been marginalised by dominant school literacy. Many instinctively think and work in visual ways (West, 1997), or are articulate and eloquent speakers who struggle to translate their ideas into conventional writing. Despite the apparent complementarity between a shift towards the multimodal and the problems monomodal texts present for dyslexic students, there does not as yet seem to be any research which addresses the interface of the New Literacy Studies and adolescent dyslexia. Ten years after the original observation, it is still true to say that "there does not appear to be a broad-based attempt to integrate models of dyslexia with either radical perspectives of literacy or social models of disability" (Herrington & Hunter-Carsch, 2001 p.114).
This may be for the following two reasons:
21 1. ‘New’ means new: NLS is a relatively young discipline, having evolved from the
meetings of The New London Group in 1994, which introduced the concept of
“multiliteracies” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000 p.5). Opportunities for such research have therefore been relatively few. Much of the work in the NLS is rooted in the anthropologically-based work of Brian Street, who challenged the dominant view of literacy, whereby a single meaning is fixed in the text (Street, 1984). In this view, any text is held to be "autonomous" and independent of the reader, giving rise to Street’s label of the "Autonomous Model" of literacy. In this volume, Street reports the use of the terms "Savage" and "Modern" to describe people in anthropological accounts of the time. "Savage" would now most likely be perceived as a racist term, helping disprove the idea of a single, fixed,
independent textual meaning. Such trenchant criticisms help Street to argue forcefully that
what the particular practices and concepts are for a given society depends upon the context; that they are embedded in an ideology and cannot be isolated or treated as ‘neutral’ or merely technical
(op.cit, p.1).
Thus he establishes the basis of the ‘Ideological’ model of literacy, diametrically opposed to the ‘Autonomous’ model. The Ideological model focuses on literacy events and practices in different contexts and cultures (often those of minority groups), rather than privileging dominant notions of literacy proficiencies and deficiencies in the individual (Gee, 1996; Maybin, 2007). Questions of identity are fundamental to this model of literacy and learning, not merely because identity shapes our interactions with texts (McCarthy & Moje, 2002), but also because identity work enables students to explore new values and ways of feeling and thinking (Gee, 2007). To my knowledge, no-one has yet turned this Ideological 'lens' on people with dyslexia, as a counter to the abundance of research on their
perceived literacy deficiencies.
In 1984, Street (op cit. p.7) noted that ethnolinguists were realising that ‘official’ or dominant grammars were inadequate for describing the variety within languages.
22 Twelve years later Gunther Kress, subsequently a member of the New London Group, co-authored “Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). This book employed the term "new literacy" (p.33) in calling for analysis of texts to attend to their integrated visual and textual components in order to fully appreciate meanings. It also borrowed the term "modality" from linguistics to mean the truth value or creditability of statements about the world (p.160). In much NLS work, ‘multimodality’ appears to refer more simply to there being multiple modes of communication being employed in the production and reception of any text. However, in Kress and van Leewen’s definition, “any text whose meanings are realised in more than one semiotic code is multimodal”
(p.183). "Semiotic code" refers to the system of signs used in meaning making, and recognises that these signs are determined by historical and social convention as well as the affordances of the medium through which they are transmitted. As in Street's work, a reliable understanding of a text thus relies on knowledge of the broader context, as well analysis of its content.
2. The difficulty of incorporating the concept of dyslexia into the NLS framework.
Dyslexia would seem to belong to the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy, rejected in the ‘ideological’ model espoused by the NLS. There is therefore implicit rejection of the notion of dyslexia in the NLS, though the term has been used in work by leaders in the NLS field (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). However, the NLS takes a social, context-sensitive perspective on literacy and, in parallel with the social model of disability, would recognise that dyslexia can only be a problem in societies that depend on autonomous, alphabetic literacy. The potential for a societal shift away from the historically dominant, monolithic, autonomous model of literacy is explored further below.
When considering new literacies, multimodality is a principal concern of Kress (2003). He argues that the digitised dominance of the mode of image and medium of screen “will have profound effects on human… engagement with the world, and on the forms and shapes of knowledge. The world told is different to the world
23 shown” (p.1, original italics). Researchers at the US National Centre for
Supercomputing Applications have, for instance, developed 3D graphic models of complex thunderstorm systems which permit more immediate and intuitive understanding than 2D diagrams, prose explanations or mathematical formulae (SIGGRAPH, 2005; see also Oblinger, 2008). The models were developed six years ago. Given the rate of technological advance it is inevitable that this degree of image sophistication will become commonplace in the near future.
A societal shift towards a ‘post-typographic’ paradigm has some conceivably seismic consequences for students with dyslexia, who have traditionally struggled with, and been excluded by, school literacies. Cyberspace is fundamentally inclusive, and learning “can be peer-aided, can find its way around faulty spelling, can lean heavily on the use of icons, sound/audio, graphics and so on” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, p.71). This shift is illustrated by, for example, the way the BBC now presents its news online. In many leading stories, the webpage is dominated by a video clip, placed centrally at the top of the page. The main body of the text - the written news story is placed below the invitation to view the video clip. It may be invisible unless the user scrolls down. Text is subordinate to sound and graphics.
A shift away from textual representations of concepts and processes towards a much more visual approach would lend itself to the visual thinking processes instinctively adopted by many people with dyslexia. As a result this group of people could find themselves at the forefront of academic thinking and research because of their dyslexia rather than in spite of it (West, 1997). Of course this is speculation, but the scenario whereby in the near future different modes of non-alphabetic thought and expression become increasingly privileged is realistic; 3D television and cinema are now commonplace and handheld 3D videogames consoles have been launched onto the mass-market. Attree et al's (2009) evidence of enhanced problem solving in 3D virtual environments suggests that dyslexic students have much to gain from the trend towards creating and learning in these settings. Such a scenario - where students can learn via the models like the 3D ones of
thunderstorms mentioned above - could overturn the construction of dyslexia as a
24 problem by a word-literate academic elite and generate a societal power-shift towards those with a greater facility for dealing with images, spatial arrangements and multimodality: if this, or something like it, is to be the case, educationalists may have much to learn from ICT users with dyslexia.
Currently, much ICT practice simply transposes offline activities online – reading a single Wikipedia entry is not substantially different to consulting Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is therefore not surprising that students with dyslexia continue to struggle in virtual environments like chat rooms and discussions that require them to work read and write in much the same way as they would be expected to with pen and paper (Woodfine et al, 2005; Williams, Jamali & Nicholas, 2006; Hughes, 2007). However, as bandwidth and processing speed rise, sound, image and writing are increasingly being combined in multimodal artefacts, which may have spatial arrangement as a defining compositional characteristic. Multimodal artefacts and virtual environments thus have the potential to play to the reported strengths of many people with dyslexia. In addition to this, ICT has been shown to increase student motivation towards research, writing and editing and presentation of work – precisely the areas many students with dyslexia and other literacy disabilities struggle in (Passey & Rogers, 2004; Faux, 2005). In their national survey, Passey and Rogers (2004) found that the greatest improvements in attainments as a result of improved pupil motivation occurred in the secondary design and technology curriculum – precisely where we would expect to find a high incidence of dyslexia.
Much of the discourse around dyslexia and ICT has focused on specialist
intervention programmes and tools, but we may need to start thinking more about how it can open the doors for a group traditionally marginalised by institutionally-constructed literacies (LeCourt, 2001): about liberation rather than conformity and intervention.
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