| The purpose of the study is to expand what we mean by literacy to include multiple ways of knowing and constructing meaning. Specifically, this study explores the need for adolescents to find their own voices in the composing process.;I observed adolescents at a 1997 state-sponsored summer program for the media arts and interviewed six participants. While I borrowed from case study research methods (Stake, 1995) and from personal experience/narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994) for models of collection and interpretation of field texts, I primarily adopted an arts-based approach to educational inquiry throughout (Eisner, 1991; Barone & Eisner, 1997).;I represented the students using co-constructed collages, poems, conversations. I chose collage as the medium which best facilitated the externalization of my internal interpretive processes. A viewer/reader's guide is provided to help a range of readers to interpret these collages.;Implications of this study focus on encouraging all teachers to become more conscious of their own and their students' internal composing processes across media. By including visual and tactile learners, for example, within our notion of "a literate community," we extend to a vast array of people an invitation that reaches across culture, race, class, and gender. By welcoming students who have different ways of thinking and expressing themselves, different points of view, different ways of learning, and different ways of living, i.e., those who have acquired different literacies, we open the door to a truly democratic education for everyone, and interpersonal as well as intercultural understandings are enhanced. Within an expanded definition of literacy, we recognize that verbal language is not necessarily the most effective way to communicate our experience to others. Movement across sign systems is as important as fluency and flexibility within and across language systems, and we need to set up classroom environments that support and encourage transmediation. |
