Page 64 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 53

Modes and the shaping of knowledge
Let me move to my next example, which contrasts a written with a visual
representation of ‘the same phenomenon’: blood circulation. The teacher had, in
the one instance, asked the children to write a ‘story’ of the journey of a red
blood cell around the body. In the other case the teacher had asked groups of
children, two or three in each case, to construct ‘concept maps’, also of
blood circulation. Apart from the fact that the children responded in the most
varied ways to the generically vague term ‘story’ – from diary, as here (see
Figure 4.3), to fairy tale, to James Bond thriller, to scientific report – and that
each of these generic forms in itself has affordances in respect to this task, I want
to focus on the affordances of the mode of writing and the mode of image, in the
genre represented here.
In this brief analysis I will focus on the notion of movement. In the written
mode, there is a requirement to lexicalise movement, to name it. That is, the
writer has to find words to represent movement – leave, come, squeeze, drop off,
enter. This requirement for naming is, from the point of view of the exercise set
here, an irrelevance, an accident, a kind of ‘noise’. The scientific account is
interested in the abstracted notion of ‘movement’ and not in any of the specific
lexicalisations of it; it is not interested in the meanings of the various words.
They are a kind of unrequired by-product of using writing. And yet, if this writer
were to use the word ‘move’ constantly, he would feel uncomfortable, and even
the science teacher might say, ‘can’t you find some different words, this is a bit
repetitive’. This is a further accident, not a part of the mode but a part of the
conventions of the use of the mode, namely that there should be variety.
The generic aspect of the text, namely that there are identifiable chunks of
time, is again accidental, but this accident works well in this case – it
corresponds to one manner in which the teacher had taught this phenomenon: the
blood cells moving from ‘organ’ to ‘organ’ as a motion from one place to
another place, doing their specific task at each, or having things done to them.
But the epistemological commitment which the mode of writing demands,
namely the (various) naming of the process ‘moving’, is not something that is
part of the curriculum. The fact that each clause reports movement, in some way,
with an agent that moves, and a location where it moves from or to, is also
useful. So is the fact that the clauses are in temporal sequence, and that the
chunks of time of the diary also stand in sequence. The genre diary was well
chosen, and some of the affordances of writing – though definitely not all – serve
the purposes of the task well.
In the concept map, by contrast, movement is indicated in a much sparser, less
diverse, more abstracted way, as vectors with directionality or direction, that is,
through arrows pointing from one ‘place’ to another. Of course, ‘direction’ is
also a lexicalisation, a visual metaphor, in fact. Direction is not movement; it
indicates the vector of movement. But here ‘movement’ is sparsely lexicalised,
and each ‘lexical item’ carries just the one single meaning, whereas ‘squeezed’,