Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

6. Invention, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom: The Storyboard as Exemplary Genre

143 C h a pte r 6 Invention, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom The Storyboard as Exemplary Genre Nathaniel I. Córdova If English is to remain relevant as the subject which provides access to participation in public forms of communication, as well as remaining capable of providing understandings of and the abilities to produce culturally valued texts, then an emphasis on language alone simply will no longer do. English will need to change. —Gunther Kress (1999, 67) For who does not know, except them, that the art of using letters is fixed and unchanging, so that we always use the same letters for the same purposes, but in the art of discourse the case is entirely the reverse? —Isocrates, Against the Sophists What might it mean to be multimodally literate today, and what would it take to sustain such literacy in an age of rapidly changing cultural and technological innovation? To be sure, the question is not original, many have asked it before me, but it is a persistent question precisely because any possible answer, like the conditions that give rise to such rapid change, must perforce constantly evolve. In a very Darwinian sense then, adaptation is the key. To say, however, that culture and technology change rapidly and that we must adapt if we want to remain “literate,” is as obvious 144  Nathaniel I. Córdova as it is unhelpful and unclear. The question after all is not about change per se, but about agency: what can we do to cope effectively with not just evolutionary but revolutionary change that shapes the cultural, political, and economic life of a people? As educators, the corollary follows, how might we teach not just adaptation but a liberatory praxis that provides an inclusive, democratic, and existential framework for, in the words of the New London Group (NLG 1996), “designing social futures?” In their ground-setting article in the Harvard Educational Review, the NLG (1996, 9) attempted an answer that centered on extending “the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy.” Their article, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies : Designing Social Futures,” (and the chapter by the same title in their subsequent book (NLG 2000) grounded such a multiliteracies pedagogy as a response to two main cultural trends captured succinctly in this formulation: “First we want to extend the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies; to account for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate. Second , we argue that literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (ibid., 61). This explanation rightfully connected rapidly changing global conditions, with the plurivocality we increasingly experience in our society, and the need to effectively negotiate the multiplicity of discourses and discursive forms that technological innovation generates . In particular, the New London Group’s concern was with how new technological innovation and changing cultural life produced unprecedented waves of information that significantly affected people’s working, public, and personal lifeworlds. The NLG’s effort found motivational impetus in how new information technologies reshape the kind of literacies needed to lead working, public, and personal lives, and how a refurbished educational practice ought to respond to such demands. These concerns are tightly integrated as new communication and information technologies, coupled with the rapid cultural change we’ve experienced as a result of such development, have generated an emerging digital culture in which traditional notions of text, reading, composition, and understanding are differently realized. Alongside such changes comes the realization that meaning making in our contemporary world is not a linear proposition, tied only to an alphabetical literacy, but that it is increasingly multimodal and interactive. In effect, the NLG called us to a pedagogy responsible for developing an Invention, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom  145 “epistemology of pluralism” focused on the metaphor of design as “metalanguage of multiliteracies” (ibid., 73). Such a pedagogy of design was broken down into three main categories: available design, design, and the redesigned. In the vocabulary of discourse analysis this metalanguage of multiliteracies translates “available design” as the cultural and symbolic resources at our disposal, and the structures in place already constituted and available for our use, manipulation, and consumption. In a fortuitous turn of phrase, the NLG refers to available design as the “grammars of various...