Literacy in the new media age: Creativity as multimodal design

Much of the current discourse of adolescence is best described as emblematic of modernity, as colonial, as gendered, and as
administrative (Lesko, 2001) working to maintain “progressive” school literacy practices that ignore adolescents’ new
“cyber-techno subjectivity” (Luke & Luke, 2001) and creativity in the “new media age” (Kress, 2003). School curricula
often do not acknowledge the range of skills adolescents acquire outside formal education. Youths’ new multimodal social
and cultural practices—as they fashion themselves creatively in multiple modes as different kinds of people in “New
Times” (Luke, 1998)—points to the liberating power of new technologies that embrace their imagination and creativity. In
two middle years classes, adolescents’ creativity was recognised and validated when they were encouraged to re-represent
curricular knowledge through multimodal design (New London Group, 1996). The results suggest the changed classroom
habitus (Bourdieu, 1980) produced new and emergent discursive and material practices where creativity, through
imaginative collaboration, emerges as capital in an economy of practice (Bourdieu, 1996). The findings suggest schools
should recognize adolescents’ creativity—that often manifests itself through their cultural and social capital resources—as
they integrate and adapt to the new affordances acquired through their out-of-school literacy practices.

Key words: creativity, literacy, adolescents, capital

Introduction

Releasing the Imagination

Ten years ago, as a graduate student taking a course with Maxine Greene, I was constantly challenged by her
questions and reflections on her life as a teacher. In class she often challenged us to not comply with the
dominant voices of school officials who prescribed the teaching of certain kinds of knowledge to meet
predetermined and measurable goals. Instead, she encouraged us to use our imagination to “break with ordinary
classifications and come in touch with actual young people in their variously lived situations” (Greene, 1995,
p.14). She referred to this as taking “action” and “seizing initiatives” and described imagination as the
“gateway” through which students’ past experiences find their way into the present.

Her ideas, almost ten years ago—before I had a computer in my classroom—resonate well with literacy theorists
concerned with preparing teachers to work with diverse learners engaged in multiple and “new literacies”
(Lankshear & Knobel, 2002; Luke, 2000; Luke & Elkins, 1998; Snyder & Beavis, 2004). The multimodal textual
practices of youth (Beavis, 2001, 2004) today are more technically complex and sophisticated and entirely more
creative as they engage in multimodal communication (Lemke, 2006). Yet educational systems continue to
maintain monomodality through nationwide or statewide annual tests of literacy almost entirely based on skills
with words (Vincent, 2006) that don’t recognize their creativity as the increasingly engage in multimodal
reading/analysis and design.

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In my own urban year eight classroom, the arts were outside my humanities curriculum as I was too busy
orchestrating the progressive reading and writing workshop (Atwell, 1998; Calkins, 1991, 1994, 2000). As
students became wired and their social practices moved in and between online spaces, the workshop model
worked more to divide and subordinate students in my classroom than build community because it ignores
students’ hybrid identities and the identity fluidity needed to survive in the postmodern world (Gee, 2000a).
Progressive pedagogies required students to act and think in certain ways adopting prescribed identities that
mirror what Lesko (2001) refers to as “prescribed by turn-of-the-century reformers” (p.172) who ignore the
unstable societal conditions produced by fluid global communication media that have transformed linear class
and power structures (Bean & Readence, 2002).

Desiring to interrupt and transform our progressive literacy practices I embodied Maxine Greene’s challenge and
made the arts central to my curriculum. This coupled with acknowledging students’ lifeworlds and their out-of-
school digital literacy practices, set up the context necessary for students to creatively re-represent curricular
knowledge through multimodal design (New London Group, 1996). The interruptions broke through the
workshop routine and it is my contention that these informed engagements with the arts released my students’
imaginative creativity as we collectively worked to combat standardization or “what authoritative others were
offering as objectively, authoritatively “real”(Greene, 1995).

Creativity in the new media age

Facer and Williamson (2004) view creativity as vital to youths’ “abilities to work imaginatively and with a
purpose, to judge the value of their own contributions and those of others, and to fashion critical responses to
problems across all subjects in the curriculum” (p.2). Central to their idea is also the notion of collaboration in
creative learning and youths’ capacity to evaluate and rationalize their opinions; to gather knowledge with/from
others; to share their knowledge with others; and to transform their existing understandings as learners in a
constant process of personal and social development. They make use of the National Advisory Committee on
Creative and Cultural Education’s (1999) definition of creativity as an “imaginative activity fashioned so as to
produce outcomes that are both original and of value.” I like this definition because it points to the social
aspects of creativity rather than the psychological ones. The definition comes close to recognizing creativity
within the social exchange and part of a particular form of recognition in strategies realised in different fields of
play.

Thinking about creativity this way—in the new media age—is sensible because we are born into a world that is
for the most part is entirely social and much of our learning develops by participating in a world where the
presence of others always and already mediates. Yet this world is in a profound state of transition. The change

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in media, largely from book and page to screen along with the change from print-based media to new
information and communication technologies, has changed what counts as literacy because of the affordances of
the multiplicity of modes made available. This is further complicated because individuals have been socialized
into particular media environments, where particular forms of media (books, PCs, MP3 players) and modes
(writing, image, HTML, etc.) are valued differently:

Those who have been socialized into the contemporary media world may be disposed to see the screen as
their point of reference for strategies of reading; those who are socialized into the former media world
may see the page as their point of reference. For members of the two (or more) groups, what appears to
be the same text calls forth different strategies of reading, and gives rise to different readings of what are
in reality different texts.(Kress, 2003, pp. 164-165)

For Kress, reading paths that were formally closed in the past are now relatively open. In the past a written text
was to be read as a written text, yet today as image increasingly supplants words across different media, it is
imperative that schools acknowledge the ‘semiotic affordances of image, of writing and of speech and of
multimodal texts, to see how the relative powers of makers and receivers of texts are reconfigured in this new
disposition (p. 166).

These ideas have substantial implications for the classroom habitus (Bourdieu, 1980) as students increasingly
engage in multimodal design (New London Group, 1996; Kress & vanLeeuwen, 1996) Kress and vanLeeuwen
(2001) describe design as something that stands midway between content and expression where “designs are
means to realize discourses in the context of a given communication situation” (p. 5). Bourdieu suggests his
concept of habitus should be seen as a method, a way of thinking about the social world and its accompanying
everyday practices. When students engage in design practices, they are “sign-making” (Kress, 2003) by acting a
specific way in a specific context using a set of available resources/modes of expression, in relation to a
predetermined audience. Because habitus consists of systems of dispositions that produce behaviors, including
perceptions, expectations, and actions in particular or definite situations, creativity becomes a consequence of
these actions as youth transform the resources at hand to design and produce messages/signs and/or traversals
across space. Thus creativity in the new media age is synonymous with innovativeness because adolescents are
creating something “new” that has value to them in different fields of play. All signs are “new” as students
combine available semiotic resources (Kress, 2003) and often students are creating new, emergent genres that
are taking advantage of the multimodal affordances of new media (Lemke, 2003). When the workshop
curricula were interrupted a new classroom habitus emerged where students’ everyday literacy practices outside
of school—or their established and emerging digital literacy practices —were recognized. Teachers can
significantly alter their classroom habitus, not in deterministic ways, by allowing students to engage in

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multimodal design. This in turn offers the possibility of generating a wider repertoire of possible creative design
practices and actions, perhaps unavailable in the habitus of progressive workshop classroom.

The study

At the time I gathered the data for the study, I was a full-time year eight humanities teacher in a small academy
of technology in New York City’s Chinatown. Most of my students were first and second generation Chinese
immigrants who received free or reduced price lunch and each class had thirty students. This work stems from a
larger study (Walsh, 2006) that focused on shifts in teacher and students’ literacy practices analyzing critical
incidents that triggered curricular interruptions where critical and visual literacy, then Multiliteracies and the
incorporation of digital and multimedia design countered the monomodality embedded in the discursive and
sociocultural practices of progressive workshop pedagogies.

Teaching Creatively

In making arts central to my curriculum, I put aside our textbooks and taught students about the Dustbowl
Migration and The Great Migration of the Negro through photography, painting, folk music, the Blues, jazz and
film. The Migration Unit, our fourth unit of study for the academic year explored the two migrations initially
through the arts, and then incorporated print texts reading them intertextually; assessing their sources and
purposes and their location in historical contexts. We also questioned texts by uncovering gaps and silences and
then categorised them or rewrote ones where our evidence-based interpretations were at odds with the authors.
Through the use of an LCD projector and a high speed internet connection shared over eight computers, we had
effortless access to the photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Jacob Lawrence’s panel series on
The Migration of the Negro, the music of Woody Guthrie and many Blues, jazz and gospel singers.

In starting the unit, different groups of students were assigned to locate many of the curricular resources and then
we organized them online for easy curricular access. Different groups worked to gather Dorothea Lange’s
photography and the music/lyrics of Woody Guthrie. Other students designed sites to create visual narratives of
the migration of the “Oakies” through photography while some gathered primary documents including
interviews, newspaper articles, and ecological information as to the causes of the Dust Bowl. Students primarily
designed all of the resources used in the unit because their acquisition of screen-based literacies was well beyond
that of mine. In this sense, students had a better understanding of what was valid/creative in the field of web
design. Having students use their out-of-school literacies to engage creatively with and design valuable and
relevant classroom resources was surprisingly successful in helping me acquire a similar habitus. Because much
of the work was collaborative, teams of students came together and taught each other many of the ICT skills they
had acquired, thus there all students were able to participate in the curriculum. Unlike texts they produced in the

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workshop—that had a relatively short “shelf life”—these texts became central to our present (and future)
curriculum, consequently changing what counts as knowledge and learning in our classroom.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

While students were working on the Dust Bowl resources, I worked diligently, after many student-taught
tutorials, to design sites we could use to investigate the Great Migration of the Negro. I designed a site entitled,

5
“the blues” with a section on blues musicians and a site with selected images from Jacob Lawrence’s The
Migration of the Negro (1940-1941). Initially students thought the sites were useful, but when I tried to play
them an excerpt from Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit, when we were studying lynching as a factor that pushed
African-Americans north, the song did not load correctly. They complained saying, “Chris, why don’t you just
download the MP3 of the song so we can listen to the whole thing?” At the time I had not idea what they were
talking about. Most of them could read the confusion on my face and asked, “haven’t you downloaded songs
before?” At that point, a student got up, went to the computer and downloaded file-sharing software onto our
school’s server. A few minutes later, the software was up and running and he typed “Strange Fruit” into the
“search” field and within seconds began to download it. Shortly, we were all listening to a more poignant Nina
Simone eerily singing while we read the lyrics on the big screen with the LCD projector.

I realized it was in everyone’s best interest if I continue to learn web design, but let the students take over the
design creativity. The sites I was designing (Figures 4 & 5 ) were quite text heavy and linear in comparison to
those of my students (Figures 1 & 6 ). Furthermore, I did not have the skills to include popup pages with
dropdown menus of songs by famous Blues musicians (Figure 6). My students were teaching themselves these
complex design skills or acquiring them through different communities of practice they engaged in. This is a
small example of the “profound social, economic and technical world which in the end will shape the futures of
literacy” (Kress, 2003, p. 176)

Figure 4

6
Figure 5

Figure 6

Allowing students to engage in multimodal design harnessed their creative capacity and energies as the adapted
to the affordances of new and complex kind of sign-making. When I asked Danny what he thought about the unit
he responded in the affirmative:

C: What did you think about learning about the Great Migration through Jacob Lawrence’s painting?
D: I think they were kind of…I never thought they could use paintings to still show us how they were
feeling or…it just gave me a different perspective because it was not like showing the actual person’s
face, but was giving an idea of how he thought. We would think it could be one thing then another, but
it could be both at the same time.
C: Do you think it helped you understand that time in history , to look at different kinds of texts?
D: Yeah it did because of …it would give me opinions and ideas of how I would think of the time,
because it showed me history instead of giving me a reading of a text. It would give me the idea
straight-up, easy to remember instead of relying on the text where you have to remember word by word
probably or even remember the words.

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Yuan also talks about remembering studying migration through the arts:

Y: I definitely remember Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration and all of the lynching photographs, I
will never forget them because at that time you were showing all those art like photography, those Negro
spirituals, and…
C: You remember the music as well?
Y: Yeah, all those kinds of arts. And yeah, we did a site on it on how they, how all those things can
portray and depict this era that are better than just print texts on paper.
C: Why is it better?
Y: Because it helps you relive the time better than the history text.
C: You get to see, hear…
Y: Yeah, by all of the people who had been through it, I mean history texts are just a bunch of gatherings
of what other people have said. They haven’t lived through it. How are they supposed to know how it
really feels?

My adolescent students used their imagination to draw on a number of textual and intertextual creative strategies
in their participation and design of different multimodal texts. Within most progressive workshop pedagogies,
students create monomodal texts that teachers usually model in min-lessons. Thus the range of meanings—
because additional modes are not present—are often restricted furthering my view of the inadequacy of the ideas
and theories from progressive workshop pedagogies. This thinking is analogous to that of Bernstein (1975) and
Lesko (2001) who warn against reoccurring school practices in ritualized ways that have contradictory effects
that differentiate students. It has been argued that because texts and text practices are historically and socially
bounded and implicated in power relationships, Bourdieusian field analysis (Albright, 2006) may allow
educators to understand homologies between the construction of literacy education in sites that span institutions
such as homes, school, neighborhoods, and online spaces.

Discussion

Creativity as capital

Literacy is always ideological and power is a central problem facing literacy studies like this one. This is more
important when considering issues of access and equity. From a sociocultural perspective, schools and
classrooms are implicated in the distribution of cultural capital associated with particular literacy practices and
textual resources—capital that is unevenly valued and distributed (Luke, 2000). Unlike a top-down view of
power that simply divides the powerful from the powerless, this perspective locates power in the relationships

8
between individuals and institutions (Street, 1995). Additionally, as Kress (1999) and Luke (2000) point out,
literacy studies must attend to the effects of power on texts; that is how texts encode social relationships between
authors, audience and the discourse in which they participate.

I want to illustrate this with a group of my students who decided to compete in a web design project advertised
through the New York City Public Library. The ThinkQuest competition was motivating because the first place
prize was a new laptop for each student on the design team. After I agreed to be their coach, students thought it
would be a good idea to use the work we completed in the migration unit as a basis of the project. They enjoyed
experiencing history through the arts and came up with the title of “Con  Texts,” representing the
intertextual and discourse analytic literacy practices we had completed throughout the year. Their website
positions readers to move between different texts to “read” two historical migrations through the arts. As a
result of our curricular work, they came to believe that most school history texts don’t explore the migration of
the Oakies and the Great Migration adequately or honestly (Figure 7).

Figure 7

The students, through our curricular work came to see history texts as highly biased. The construction of the
website represents the multiple literacies the students taught and learned in community and school fields (New
London Group, 1996). They combined their out-of-school literacies and school-based literacies in hopes of
winning the competition. The introduction to the site visually plays with the idea of reading between, across and
against texts with the depiction of the two circles (2 migrations) and the back and forth arrow between them
(Figure 8).

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Figure 8

The same idea of reading between and against texts is presented at the bottom of each page where the
reader/viewer can choose to view, listen and/or read about Woody Guthrie, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, or
The Blues (Figure 9). Unlike the progressive workshop, with affordances available for multimodal design,
students can use their creativity in what Kress (2003) calls “ensembles” of writing, speech, image, music and
traversals that incorporate the “demands and potentials of all the modes involved” (p.170).

Figure 9

10
Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

These examples reflect how students’ literacy practices shifted in light of changing social, cultural,
technological, economic and political contexts for our lives and teaching. It also represents how the formation of
their habitus requires and reflects being in particular situations and being with other students in an “open system

11
of disposition undergoing a continuous experience-dependent transformation embodying its own history and
experiential trajectory” (Roth, 2002). As a teacher, I taught creatively, coparticipating with students to c produce
the context(s) necessary for them to engage in a variety of critical practices without necessarily condemning their
cultural terrain. Recognizing students as designers as an essential pedagogic aim (Kress, 2003) offers an
alternative vision for the future development of creativity and literacy that have the potential to improve youth’s
educational opportunities as representational modes effect the shaping of knowledge.

The adolescent students in this study, as they harness their creativity through design, re-represent curricular
knowledge in increasingly non-linear terms because they seem to understand, from their own experience, that
reading of any multimodal text is shaped by the author’s and the reader’s choices. Not wanting to just showcase
their abilities to the terrain of curricular knowledge, students transferred their design practices to what they refer
to as the “present day” where they use the same design scheme to illustrate how musicians like John Lennon,
Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Naz and Christine Aguliera critique issues such as diversity, racism,
sexism and war (Images 13-18).

Figure 13

Figure 14

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Figure 15

Figure 16

Figure 17

13
Figure 18

Figure 19

The students’ design expertise won them first place in ThinkQuest’s challenge. This experience, especially
winning the laptop, was exceedingly rewarding for the students. Importantly, it also identifies implications for
educators, administrators, curriculum developers and teacher educators and the need for broader public
discussions and classroom understandings about the field-specific social consequences of literacy instruction.

Turning to Bourdieu’s (1986) economy of practice that contends that all human activity or practice involves
exchange between individuals and groups (Carrington & Luke, 1997). I want to speculate about how my
students’ participation in ThinkQuest portrays students’ immaterial forms of exchange, or literacy practices, as a
source of social power and control realised through creativity. Carrington and Luke (1997) describe practices
within this economy:

All practice thus is directed, consciously or otherwise, at the maximization of social advantage, the
theory of practice, then, outlines the dialectical relationship between the objective structures of a

14
 society and the practical, goal-seeking activities of individuals. In such a model, spoken and written
textual practice forms a powerfully mediating moment where human agency and social structure,
motivation and norm are realized. (p. 100)

Similarly, my students are passing through many different social fields in addition to school as they play out
their individual life trajectories. They are what Gee (2000) would call “shape-shifting portfolio people” because
they are distributed within, and move through, different fields according to the relative accumulations of capital,
each predisposed to pursue social power and a degree of control over their moves ad exchanges within and
across these fields (Carrington & Luke, 1997).

Literacy as a form of cultural capital remains what many would term as Bourdieu’s principle contribution to
current understandings of literacy (Collins, 1993; Luke, 1995; Carrington & Luke, 1997). The ThinkQuest
contest took place in familiar and new fields for the students. When the students encountered the public, out-of-
school field of the design contest, they realized the field, different from their classroom, recognized and
privileged different kinds of creativity (forms of capital). When students moved into a differing institutional
configuration, they sought to accumulate different literacy practices because they recognized that they offer
particular powers, especially when combined with other forms of capital they already possess (traditional school
literacies).

In competing in the competition the students were striving for economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and formed a
team drawing on their social capital or the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or
a group by virtue of possessing a strong network of more or less institutional relationships of mutual
acquaintance and recognition (Luke & Carrington, 1997). As a result of their group membership, the students
have access to the collective capital and creativity of all of the members in the group and the accompanying
social distinction their membership allows. The cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) each student brought to the
team included the differing literacy practices, or creative collaboration (knowledge of different software
programs, curricular knowledge, writing skills, etc.) they possessed that where transmissible to others. The
students formed the team based on their objectified cultural capital (the transmissible literacy practices) as well
as their institutional cultural capital referring to their academic qualifications and grades as authorized by me the
teacher and our school. The ThinkQuest competition describes how a group of successful students draw on their
cultural and social capital resources—including imagination and creativity—to design a website that reflects the
acquisition and articulation of students out-of-school literacy skills recognized within the curriculum.
Furthermore, adolescents’ literacy practices within school, shifted their individual habituses in ways that are
more aligned with new media age representing their subsequent and simultaneous capacity and inclination to
accumulate and utilize fitting capital resources.

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