Modes, Literacies and Power: A University Case Study

Insights into the importance of the multimodal and increasingly visual nature of communication in everyday life challenges language and literacy teaching in interesting ways. This paper assesses an attempt to bring the analysis of multimodal texts of cultural interest to students into a critical literacy foundation course in the Humanities at a South African university. I show how, against the intentions of the course designers, the course privileged cultural capital and reproduced patterns of privilege. I argue that acknowledging multimodal texts raises new and interesting questions about power and access. In highly vested, public sites such as described in this paper, new modes add new dynamics, with uncertain outcomes. I argue that, to harness the potential of multimodal approaches, more thought should be given to pedagogical issues, in the context of institutional discourses and literacy practices.

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