Communities of Practice: An Alaskan Native Model for Language Teaching and Learning

4. On Becoming a “Literate” Person: Meaning Making with Multiliteracies and Multimodal Tools

73 chapter four On Becoming a “Literate” Person Meaning Making with Multiliteracies and Multimodal Tools Joan Parker Webster and Theresa Arevgaq John “Reinventing” in the colonizer’s tongue and turning those images around to mirror an image of the colonized to the colonizers as a process of decolonization indicates that something is happening, something is emerging and coming into focus that will politicize as well as transform literary expression . harjo and bird (1997, p. 22) In this chapter, we tell the story of the conception, development, and implementation of a summer intensive master’s-level course titled “Multiliteracies in Second Language Classrooms.” By multiliteracies we mean an expansion of the traditional view of school-based literacy that reaches beyond the linguistic realm of reading and writing. The overall process supporting the evolution of the course is rooted in dialogic discussions among the stakeholders (doctoral student and coinstructor/adviser, faculty member, and master’s students) participating in a collaborative research group, Multiliteracies Graduate Research Collaborative (GRC), a subgroup of the Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education (SLATE) program. These discussions, which stem from ongoing conversations conducted during sessions taking place each semester, are concerned with theoretical and methodological issues related to teaching and learning multiliteracies in diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, particularly those situated in Indigenous communities. Thus, using this dialogic process , we initiate a new dialogue between the notion of multiliteracies described in Western academic literature and Indigenous multimodal methodologies of traditional oral storytelling, music, dance, and culturally 74 • Webster and John based subsistence activities, which provided the basis for the summer course. We begin with an overview of the methodology used for the data collected and analyzed in this chapter. Next, we present our conceptual framework supporting the new dialogue developed in this course and continue the discussion with descriptions of the course design and instructional procedures stemming from that framework. We discuss the themes that emerged through data collected from our course activities and discussions . We conclude with reflections on the course that provide new directions for further dialogic conversations. Methodology Theoretical Framework A primary principle that guides our research is bringing together multiple cultural perspectives, theories, and methodologies to gain greater understanding of the commonalities and differences across diverse knowledge systems. This principle is important because, in our view, the inclusion of methodological and theoretical perspectives other than the traditional Western view can help ease the apprehension and mistrust felt by Indigenous communities toward university-based research. In many instances, this mistrust stems from constituted power relations that privilege the established academic community over those communities and individuals often considered subjects in university-based research. In such power relationships , members of disadvantaged groups are often willing to set aside their mistrust and accept the goodwill extended by the privileged, but they are also aware that such goodwill on the part of the privileged groups is not enough to overcome the assumptions and attitudes that have evolved over years of power and privilege (Narayan 1988). Therefore, we find it imperative to situate our research within a framework that supports a real dialogue between members of groups with heterogeneous composition, such as those representing the Western academy and those representing the Indigenous community. The Western theoretical framework that most closely fits this notion of dialogue is Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, in particular the notion of communicative action oriented toward understanding (Habermas 1987), because it privileges a notion of understanding that can occur only in a negotiated way on the terms of the people involved in the communicative act. In our collaborative research experiences with Yup’ik communities, we have discovered that the notion of communicative action oriented toward understanding, based in work- Meaning Making with Multiliteracies and Multimodal Tools • 75 ing toward a collaborative negotiation of meaning within the group, also underscores the theory and practice of communicative interactions Yup’ik elders employ in their epistemological, theoretical, and methodological discussions that take place at community dance performances, storytelling events, and elder meetings. Therefore, Habermas’s theory of communicative action seems an appropriate framework for opening a space for dialogue among different academies situated in and out of university contexts (Parker Webster & John 2010). We also use a critical ethnographic methodology put forth by Phil Francis Carspecken (1996). The notion of “critical” when attached to research has two distinct yet interconnected meanings. Critical can refer to the value orientation of the researcher—often referred to as...