Working with Multimodality: Rethinking Literacy in a Digital Age / Edition 1

by Jennifer Rowsell

Overview

In today’s digital world, we have multiple modes of meaning-making: sounds, images, hypertexts. Yet, within literacy education, even ‘new’ literacies, we know relatively little about how to work with and produce modally complex texts.

In Working with Multimodality, Jennifer Rowsell focuses on eight modes: words, images, sounds, movement, animation, hypertext, design and modal learning. Throughout the book each mode is illustrated by cases studies based on the author’s interviews with thirty people, who have extensive experience working with a mode in their field. From a song writer to a well known ballet dancer, these people all discuss what it means to do multimodality well.

This accessible textbook brings the multiple modes together into an integrated theory of multimodality. Step-by-step, beginning with theory then exploring modes and how to work with them, before concluding with how to apply this in an investigation, each stage of working with multimodality is covered.

Working with Multimodality will help students and scholars to:
• Think about specific modes and how they function
• Consider the implications for multimodal meaning-making
• Become familiar with conventions and folk knowledge about given modes
• Apply this same knowledge to their own production of media texts in classrooms

Assuming no prior knowledge about multimodality and its properties, Working with Multimodality is designed to appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in how learning and innovation is different in a digital and media age and is an essential textbook for courses in literacy, new media and multimodality within applied linguistics , education and communication studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415676205
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/18/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jennifer Rowsell holds a Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies at Brock University, Canada. She is co-author of Design Literacies (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

1. Film 2. Sound 3. Visual 4. Interface 5. Videogame 6. Space 7. Movement 8. Word 9. Textile. Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

‘A rare edited collection that is essential reading. We humans are par excellence meaning makers and today we have more ways to make meaning than ever before. Working with Multimodality maps the terrain with verve, passion, and a myriad of wonderful details.’

James Paul Gee, Arizona State University, USA

'Working with Multimodality is an intensely practical and an excitingly theoretical book. The author brings ‘intuitive’ practices into the descriptive range of theory. To practice she brings explicit accounts; to theory she brings a vastly enriched sense of the relation of materiality, embodiment and meaning.'

Gunther Kress, Institute of Education, UK

From the Publisher