Page 130 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND GENRE 119

Genre and educational strategies
The profound cultural diversity of all contemporary ‘Western’ post-industrial
societies, as much as the new demands for education for participation in a fully
globalised economy, has specific educational consequences. It means that an
‘outcomes-based curriculum’ or, to use a better formulation, a curriculum which
focuses on skills, disposition, essential processes and understanding of resources
for representing and communicating, may be what all of ‘us’ in the anglophone
and ever more globalising world will need to consider urgently. This will be a
curriculum which focuses above all on ‘dispositions’, a return to quite traditional
notions of education – not training – on something akin to the German notion of
Bildung, but refocused clearly on the real features of the new globalising world
and its demands. I am not here thinking of the facile and deeply mistaken ideas
around skills-training, but focusing rather on giving students a full awareness of
what might be possible, beyond both the suggestions of current politics and the
seductions of the market-led consumption. Such an education would provide
them with the means both for setting their goals and for achieving them in the
contexts of their lives. This is the ability for which I use the term ‘design’. Much
more goes with that change in curriculum from either content as stable
knowledge or content as the training for skills, to dispositions to ‘design’.
A new theory of text is essential to meet the demands of culturally plural
societies in a globalising world. In my Writing the Future: English and the
Making of a Culture of Innovation (1995) I suggested that the school-subject
English needed an encompassing theory of text, in which the texts of high culture
could be brought into productive conjunction with the banal texts of the
everyday. If the literary texts which have been seen as ‘the best’ are to have real
effects on all texts, they cannot be treated as separate. I suggested three categories
of text, within the one theory: the aesthetically valued text – the texts treated by
any one cultural group as the texts which embodied for them what they saw as
best; the culturally salient text – texts which were significant for a society for any
number of reasons, but which might not meet the criteria of aesthetic value; and
the mundane text – texts of the everyday, entirely banal texts (the Annapelle text
would be an example) which are significant because they constitute, reproduce
and remake the ‘everyday’. All these will have to be dealt with within one theory
of text, within one culture, across cultures in one society and across historical
periods. But what is quite clear is that even the production of the banal text –
Annapelle – requires much more than competent knowledge.
That text is based, however imperfectly, on the understandings of design: an
understanding of what the social and cultural environment is into which my text
is to fit, the purposes it is to achieve, the resources of all kinds that I have to
implement and realise my design, and the awareness of the characteristics of the
sites of appearance of that text. That educational environment will deal with
banal texts, culturally salient texts (from all the cultures represented in one
society) and aesthetically valued texts, in all modes and in all kinds of modal