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Top1. Teachers And Students’ Education Between Multiliteracies And Technologies
The contribution focuses on the importance that the use of media, in all its meanings, acquires in the development of new alphabetical forms, both of teachers and students. It is well known in fact, that today’s knowledge society requires individuals to be equipped with innovative cognitive tools to support the sudden changes they are exposed to by contemporary events. Media constitute, as all the other cultural goods, the signs, the artefacts and lifestyles shared by individuals and are an integral part of a set of symbolic systems. Nowadays they are referred to in the international literature to reinforce the literacy processes and the individuals’ knowledge and ability repertories to build stronger cultural profiles (Nuzzaci, 2011a, pp. 19-38), because the different alphabetical needs established during the last few years have shifted the literacy axis towards multiple dimensions which roles will become in the future even more important for the diachronic and synchronic understanding of cultures and of their different expressions. Therefore, in a moment in which, the new literacy forms (especially the media ones) appear elusive and not easy to identify and to teach, and when the communication genres are constantly expanding through networks, tools, communities and purposes, it emerges the need to define and conceptualize the new “education areas.” However, at the same time, in the era of digital education, old discriminations that lead to new implicit misunderstandings of the representation, expression and organization of knowledge come back to life and, questioning the appropriateness of traditional educational practices, they challenge the education contexts and objectives.
Hence we witness to the appearance of an original “literacy epistemology” that, as a complex multimodal process working through multiple channels and plural-sign codes, makes it possible to build kills kits s every more suitable to feed people in the exercise of active citizenship.
However, today’s school system does not help promoting the significant multiple literacy (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) forms that obviously imply a change of paradigm in the ways of conceiving and developing education both in terms of teaching and learning. To give shape to such need it is necessary to redefine the relation between school and extra school to reshape the cultural intersection areas that imply the commonly used term “multi-literacy” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).
The same relation existing between technological uses at and outside school. The latter, entails, first of all, the adoption of an increasing range of channels and multimodal and semiotic (of meaning) communication systems that extends, more than replace, the types of literacy previously linked to the press, until including in the writing and in the audio speech (sound), the visual (images), the mimicry (the body language), the spatiality (the use of the space), the multimodal modality and the combination of all these elements; secondly, it amplifies the pedagogical literacy field called to take into account the cultural and linguistic diversity in which education works, answering to the global changes deriving from the interrelation between cultures and their wider circulation and from the variety of the texts and contexts. Within a society that is becoming even more “globally connected,” it arises the problem of the management of the complexity and diversity in the variety of ICT use in local contexts that, with the social and cultural characterizations expressed in the objectuality and non objectuality of the tools they represent, they stand out as vital dimensions in teachers and students’ education and in the structuring of that store of knowledge considered fundamental for the transmission, building, production and transformation of knowledge.