New Literacies and Multimodalities: Looking Back as Well as Forward

Jane Hare recently published the results of a study in The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy looking at how indigenous knowledge and schooled literacy intersect in Head Start programs on five First Nations reserves.  Though her study focuses on western Canada she draws on research from, and provides implications for, indigenous communities in the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia as well.

One major point to note is that many forms of literacy are already present in indigenous communities and families before children ever get to school.  Literacy, in this context, does not always take the form of reading text from books.  It may include books, but it will also include traditional forms such as storytelling, ceremonies, dance, and the consideration of landscapes as readable texts, as well as more recent forms like television and computers.  The current trend in teacher education programs of valuing multiple modalities and literacies is often used as a sort of short-hand to talk about appreciating different technologies as readable texts, but Hare extends this thinking backward in time as well as forward to recover traditional forms of literacy.

The problem arises out of the troubled history that indigenous communities have experienced in "educational" institutions that have ruthlessly and systematically attempted to destroy Native cultures and languages by severing the inter-generational lines along which they were traditionally transmitted.  These schools removed children as young as four from their families and attempted to indoctrinate them into European epistemologies.  As a consequence, many parents today who may very well desire their children to succeed in school-type literacy, narrowly defined, are still less than eager to engage educators.

And educators, for their part, perhaps ignorant of the scope of historical abuse, don't do enough to value indigenous culture and literacies which, research shows, is critical in successfully bridging the gap from home to school.  Teachers must be proactive in educating themselves.  Only by meaningfully engaging these communities can non-Native teachers learn to recognize and enhance opportunities to forge links between these literacies.  In a sense, they must take a page from indigenous forms of education which are experiential and holistic, experiential because their is no shortcut to engaging parents and other community members, and holistic because we cannot parcel out knowledge as European and Native.  Only when children see continuity in the valuing of (supposedly) different epistemes can they proceed on sure footing.