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WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING 127
of young people’s engagement with the institutions of state and society The classroom is
the locus for the key communicative event in children’s daily lives. It is with that
understanding that I seek to describe teachers as important cultural figures in reform
China.
The use of the descriptor ‘multi-modal’ is also helpful in acknowledging the teacher’s
role as a communicator with technologies beyond chalk and talk at her disposal.
Metaphorically, it also indicates the teacher’s role as an educator with a remit to support
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the development of the state, ‘leave not one child behind’ on the road to modernisation,
but also to respond to a greater or lesser degree to the talents of a group of particular
children in a particular place and time. The teacher must also negotiate across modalities
of location identity (urban, rural, metropolitan, minority), age, access to equipment and
training, and socio-economic conditions. Multi-modality here engages with the teacher-as-
located and specific mediator in a period of change, reform and re-conceptualisation of
education (jiaoyu) in a modernising society.
Multi-literacy has been variously interpreted in the arts and social sciences, and has
been taken up to particularly good effect in education research in Britain and elsewhere
(Lankshear et al . 1997; Amory et al . 1999; Light and Littleton 1999; Cope and Kalantzis
2000). The term requires a multi-modal understanding of language, whereby
communication practices take up variously mediated information resources, horizontally
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connected voices and ‘hot-linked’ interpretations and sources of meaning. Multi-literacy
is truly suited to describing digital texts and the relations across them and between them
and their users, creators and references. However, it can also be used to describe
competency in more familiar technologies of the classroom: from the CDROM game to
the textbook to the use of building blocks and tessellated shapes (these learning models
introduced into education by pioneers such as Maria Montessori (1870–1952), whose
ideas reached China in 1915). Multi-literacy is a concept that both acknowledges and enables
differential approaches to the development and constitution of the educated subject. I
deploy it in the context of women teachers in the PRC so as to leave an open ending to our
very preliminary discussions. Were, for example, the 20 per cent of Urumqi teachers
(women under 45/men under 48) who failed a literacy and numeracy test for primary
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educators, functionally illiterate, or did they possess knowledge and facility in modes of
communications that allowed them to work successfully with children in their schools
despite their low levels of measurable attainment?
The local and political context in which learning takes place is also of critical
importance. Edie Garvie argued in her 1976 book Breakthrough to Fluency, ‘If the packages
of language and experience are carefully matched and put together they offer truly
valuable learning material’ (Garvie 1996:111). Garvie was interested in the multi-modal
delivery of language training. Her contention reminds us more broadly, however, of the
need for a teacher’s social and political and visual literacies to be strongly based in local
sites of learning in order to ‘package’ information in a socially coherent and visually
meaningful way The package invariably will include the teacher herself, her skills and her
local knowledge. As a creature of radical reform in the late 1960s the teacher needed to
embody conflict, but her role now is more an embodiment of stability in a fragmented,
and highly uneven, national experience of enrichment.