This article was prepared by Maggie Haggerty.
Biography
Maggie Haggerty is a lecturer and professional development facilitator at Victoria University of Wellington and was a research associate for Wadestown Kindergarten's Centre of Innovation project, focusing on how children and teachers use diverse literacy modes in an early childhood curriculum.
Introduction
Working with children, student teachers and early childhood teaching teams, and being a research associate for Wadestown Kindergarten's Centre of Innovation multiple literacies project1 has made me increasingly interested in the diverse range of modes children and adults use to make sense of the world and to communicate. Modes are not easy to define. They are to do with the many possible ways of experiencing and representing the world, such as those Te Whāriki highlights: 'images, art, dance, drama, mathematics, movement, rhythm and music' 2. They are the ‘hundred languages of children' the Reggio Emilia project encourages us to listen to "with all our senses"3. Writers in the field of multiple literacies sometimes use the categories linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial to differentiate between modes4.
The more I observe a diversity of modes at work, the more convinced I become of Kress and Jewitt's observation that 'in communication, modes rarely, if ever, occur alone'5. In a snatch of conversation, for instance, we may hear of other modes children and adults use to express themselves, and to interpret or "read" the world, as, for example, when we hear a four year old kindergarten daughter telling her mum she can see that her mum has her "angry eyebrows on". This helps remind us of the role the body plays in communication. In this case the facial expression mum uses and daughter "reads".
While we may readily acknowledge the importance of being able to pick up on subtle or not-so-subtle, non-verbal social cues, it is verbal modes that education services have tended to prioritise. Many writers suggest this has been at the expense of appreciating the role and diversity of non-verbal modes, and how these modes shape what and how we learn. The examples that follow suggest looking more broadly at children's repertoire of modes, and at how various modes inter-relate and are used in combination.
1 Simonson, Y., Blake, M., La Hood, A., Haggerty, M., and Mitchell, L. (2009). A curriculum whāriki of multimodal literacies: Wadestown Kindergarten's Centre of Innovation Research. Unpublished final research report for the Ministry of Education.
2 Ministry of Education. (1996). Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa. Early childhood curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media, p.72.
3 Edwards, C., Gandini, L., and Forman, G. (Eds.). (1998). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach: Advanced reflections. Norwood, MA: Ablex Publishing Corp.
4 The New London Group. (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies designing social futures. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 9–38). London: Routledge.
5 Kress, G., and Jewitt, C. (2003). Introduction. In C. Jewitt and G. Kress (Eds.), Multimodal literacy, p.2.