“Narratives are being given a central place in the search for fresh approaches to knowing and teaching. The life stories of educators can tell researchers how those individuals have found their own centers through their chosen work; they can illustrate the primacy, in both individual lives and educational practice, of the quest for life’s meaning. . . .” (p. 129).
--Robert Atkinson, The life story interview (2002)
The faces that you see, the voices that you hear and the stories that you listen to in this exhibit are of a group of English teachers and scholars from Nepal. In some ways, these stories could sound very familiar because they are set in an educational culture that is largely based on Westernized, now almost universalized, concepts about literacy. But the experiences of these scholars are also anchored in a social setting that was isolated from the rest of the world until a few decades ago. Moreover, being in the form of video, these narratives capture a whole range of semiotic resources: the visual appearance of the narrators and their environments; their tone, voice, and accent; and their gestures and other non-verbal elements. These non-linguistic elements, along with the generally spontaneously spoken rather than written words of the narrators, constitute rich and complex stories. In this exhibit, my main goal is to discuss and illustrate how such multimodal narratives can be studied as scholarly artifacts.
Tabs on the left navigation panel are linked to sections that will open in this reading pane. I did not intend to organize this exhibit as a conventional argument that begins by first describing a theoretical framework and goes on to show how that framework applies to the issues at hand in the rest of the work. But it is possible to navigate this work as that kind of argument. In the section titled “The Third Eye,” I provide a theoretical framework for understanding the tensions between local and global concepts and cultures of literacy, education, and epistemology as they are manifest in these literacy narratives. Adopting the ideological rather than the autonomous view of literacy, I argue that we should view the concept of literacy as a cultural construct whose practice is shaped by particular material and political conditions and changes in particular societies, but because themes and ideas about being literate cross national and cultural borders in a globalized world like ours, we also need to see how the local interacts with the global. I also suggest that even though individual stories overlap with other stories in certain ways, we should see the synthesis that every narrator creates out of his or her literacy experiences as a unique view of literacy experience within his or her own thematic framework. Consequently, it is also equally feasible to read the different sections in any order. As David Bloome says in the Preface that he did, it would make sense for a reader to only watch the videos clips and understand how the narrators define literacy and view their literate lives; and it would also make sense to only read the highlighted texts until the reader finds a section that seems most interesting.
The organization of the sections in this exhibit is significantly affected by the fact that the stories here are more or less spontaneously narrated video narratives rather than conventional types of scholarly material in which the authors of the texts being analyzed might have put their ideas into organized frameworks. Therefore, besides the tension between the personal views and social forces that shape the narratives, as well as the cultural differences that make it harder to understand stories like these that are contributed to the DALN from around the world, the multimodality of these stories further adds to the challenge for scholars and researchers of literacy to analyze and understand such narratives within more linear frameworks of traditional argument. In the section titled “One World per Story,” I describe the approach that I took and the challenges that I faced in the process of this research and analysis of the literacy narratives from Nepal, sharing my thoughts about some of the ethical and professional challenges those influences posed to me as a researcher. In the following section, “The Cardinal Directions,” I discuss the influence that the media and mode of production have on the stories. I highlight how multimodal elements of such stories from cultures that may be unfamiliar to the viewer or researcher can provide rich and unique information about the narratives, and I also point out how those very features could also potentially lead to insufficient understanding or even misunderstanding on the part of the viewer or researcher.
The tab labeled “The Stories” is linked to a page that contains seven thumbnail images on the top of the page, under the title. Clicking on those thumbnails will open corresponding analysis pages in the reading pane. In these analysis sections, I take up one story at a time so as to illustrate specific aspects of the critical perspectives and analytical approaches of the preceding sections, suggesting ways in which multimodal literacy narratives from different cultures may be read, studied and analyzed as mediated scholarly and research artifacts. Because the individual narrators share unique experiences and views about literacy, I explore those issues within the context of the individual stories; however, because the narrators also come from and draw on national and global discourses about literacy, I further illustrate some general patterns by putting the stories and their narrators into a developing dialogic conversation with one another. In other words, by putting a specific set of stories from a particular socio-cultural background into direct, immediate, and meaningful conversation with one another—and by integrating multimodal texts so as to complement, supplement, and enhance the meaning of alphabetic text on the screen— this exhibit attempts to demonstrate how to “read” and conduct research with literacy narratives as mediated artifacts.
Throughout this exhibit, I use video quotations from individual narrators where their own voices seem to make a point better than my transcription or paraphrase would. I integrate “video remixes”—like the one on the right—where the narrators’ voices address similar issues. My use of video clips is intended to illustrate the affordances of multimodal material, cultural issues that readers and researchers must pay attention to while working with such mediated scholarly work from different societies, and such other elements that must be heard or seen rather than only read about. Transcripts of all video excerpts can be read in a separate transcript page linked at the bottom of each page (please use the "search/find" tool to locate the transcripts). All the transcripts are also placed in a separate page that can be accessed from a link at the bottom of all pages, where links to acknowledgments and research notes are also included.
Key points are presented in pull-quotes or highlighted by using other visual elements when the exhibit tends towards being text-intensive.
Note: In order to play the embedded video clips in this exhibit, you may need to install or update your browser's Adobe Flash Player, which can be downloaded from here.