Book Review: Embodied Literacies

Leslie Rush

Book Review: Embodied Literacies

Leslie Rush

2005, Journal of Literacy Research

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6 pages

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฀ Journal of Literacy Research | v37.3  Leslie S. Rush | University of Wyoming Pages 407-412 Book Review: Embodied Literacies Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, 2003. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (P.O. Box 3697, Carbondale, IL, 62902-3697). Softcover, 210 pages. “We cannot name the world without imagining the world, but we cannot imagine the world without naming it” (Fleckenstein, 2003, p. 33). Fleckenstein’s vision of embodied literacies begins with this twist on conventional thinking about literacy: Word and image are irrevocably connected, as “naming” and “imagining” are linked in the quote above. Building on this notion throughout her densely theorized but practice-oriented book, Fleckenstein provides a picture of what happens when a teacher puts into practice an enlarged understanding of literacy, one that incorporates not only image and word but also the influences of bodies, cultures, places, and times. A reader who takes seriously Fleckenstein’s vision of embodied literacies could not return, afterwards, to a conventional, print-focused understanding of literacy. Similarly, there is potential in this melding of idea and practice for literacy educators to revamp radically their understandings of both students and classroom practice. In her introduction and first chapter, Fleckenstein sets out what she calls a “rival imaginary”—a new way of thinking about reading and writing—one that works to dissolve boundaries between “image and word, writing and reading, meaning and teaching” (p. 5). She calls this new way of thinking about reading and writing imageword. Arguing for the inclusion of images in our thinking about literacy, Fleckenstein notes the massive presence of images in our lives and our fascination with and simultaneous repulsion by those images and their complexity. Alternative to seeing image and word as two separate systems, Fleckenstein suggests perceiving them as two parts of an intricately connected whole: ฀ Page 407  Book Review  Language can exist outside the logic of the image but with no meaning. The process of naming, the meaningfulness of language, is predicated on the existence of imagery. In life and in meaning, imagery and language enfold each other, creating each other. We can no more separate imagery from language, corporeal is logic from discursive asif logic, than we can create life by splicing DNA outside the biological matrix of a cell. (pp. 32-33) Thus, Fleckenstein argues, images and words constantly refer to each other, implicate each other, and depend on each other, as is suggested by her term imageword. Fleckenstein moves next to place her notion of imageword into an understanding of meaning-making that is ecological and transactional, with a nod to Rosenblatt (1983): Meaning-making is a transactional process among perceiver, object, and the pattern of significance a perceiver brings to that object. Chapter 2, “From a Poetics of Meaning to a Poetics of Teaching,” is devoted to an exploration of the intersections of imageword with bodies, cultures, places, and times. Using a wide range of readings and illustrations from her students, child, and friends, Fleckenstein fleshes out her notion of literacy as imageword, describing the possibilities for and influences on imageword of cultures, bodies, places, and times. She underscores the importance of recognizing that we read/write from an embodied position, that teachers and students are not practicing solely intellectual change, but “incorporating the corporeal dimension of resistance, accommodation, and enculturation into what has been too long conceived as a predominantly linguistic phenomenon” (pp. 51-52). Similarly, Fleckenstein investigates the impacts of culturally habituated ways of seeing and speaking, external and internal senses of place, and the flow of time on meaning-making. Within the ecology of meaning, all of these forces affect how meaning is made; thus, as educators, “we are called to choreograph similarly our literacy praxis, moving to imageword’s rhythm and pulsing to its dynamic” (p. 74). In Chapter 3, “The Shape and Dynamics of a Poetics of Teaching,” Fleckenstein articulates how certain of these intersections of literacy and cultures, bodies, places, and times can be combined into forms of literacies, which she calls somatic, polyscopic, and lateral literacies. Somatic literacies, those formed at the juxtaposition of bodies and places, emphasize the sitedness of ฀ Page 408 ฀ Journal of Literacy Research | v37.3  reading and writing and its connection to the body. Habits of reading and writing — such as the chair chosen to sit in, the arrangement of light in the room, a handy drink nearby — would fit into this somatic aspect of literacy. In addition, the “where” of reading and writing affects what type of reading and writing takes place. Polyscopic literacies combine the work of cultures, bodies, and places in providing particular ways of seeing and particular ways of reading and writing. Thus, certain imagewords are reinforced and validated within a culture or academic discipline. Readers and writers must first be aware of this pattern and then learn to shift among perspectives, developing multiple ways of seeing. A fusion of spatial and temporal literacies, lateral literacies concern how we create and read narratives in such a way that we can negotiate differing places and times. Lateral literacies may involve shifting among various media, which requires negotiation of a variety of narrative practices. This is particularly noticeable in navigation through cyberspace, where clear-cut divisions between image and word are not present. With these understandings of literacy as imageword in place, Fleckenstein then describes a practice, or dynamic, of literacy instruction that builds on them. This dynamic takes place in three parts: immersion, emergence, and transformation. Immersion helps students break down the artificial boundaries that separate them from creativity by, for example, moving students to a different location in which writing/reading can be differently experienced. In addition, Fleckenstein suggests having students practice empathy, trying to place themselves in the role of others, again with the object of breaking down individual, place, and cultural boundaries. The purpose of emergence, the second dynamic of this poetics of teaching, is to help students to an awareness of the impact of their own culture on creating a particular way of seeing, a particular way of doing things. Fleckenstein suggests that teachers work to juxtapose different ways of seeing in order to help students to this awareness. For example, juxtaposing different disciplines’ modes of writing can help illustrate the ways of seeing that are practiced within those disciplines. Following emergence is transformation, where students put into practice the new awareness they have created by changing and inventing rhetorical and imagistic practices. Creation of artifacts on the WWW is a possible ground for transformational work, since students can create new combinations of images and words and their own rules and ways of working. ฀ Page 409  Book Review  Having established the concept of imageword, an ecology of meaning, and the shape and dynamic of a poetics of teaching, Chapters 4 and 5 articulate what this theoretical framework means for classroom practice. In particular, Fleckenstein examines texts and methods of organizing teaching and learning that blur boundaries, that are as fluid and dynamic as the embodied and ecological meaning making of imageword. “Slippery” texts in particular are described as those that blur boundaries of topic, genre, and media. Science fiction texts that blur boundaries between human and nonhuman, cyberspace texts that integrate and create new genres, multigenre research writing, and art as prewriting are all texts/techniques that Fleckenstein uses to destabilize her students’ understanding of what text is and what text is not. As Fleckenstein argues, however, “slippery texts are a necessary but not sufficient criterion for a poetics of teaching” (p. 112). She also engages students in “slippery learning” (p. 113). Mixing her own techniques with those borrowed from others, Fleckenstein describes how her students created body biographies (Smagorinsky & O’Donnell-Allen, 1995) — artwork combined with words reflective of their embodiment — maps of their childhood homes, and other activities that combine photography, game playing, and writing. Using “slippery texts” and “slippery learning,” Fleckenstein seeks to help her students experience imageword’s dynamic, to disrupt their ways of knowing about subject, genre, and media. In the remainder of her book, Fleckenstein further applies imageword and an ecological meaning-making framework to classroom practice, describing an organizational technique she calls double mapping — layering different forms of meaning-making on one another — as “the means by which we can keep our teaching poised on the site of dissolving boundaries” (p. 142). She provides several examples of double mapping, one of which is the creation of a paper web site. For this project, students are formed into groups, and each group is assigned to create a paper web site for a particular literary text, including a variety of texts, images, and audio files. Each group sifts through its own response to the text, others’ responses to the text, and creates a logical linking of materials around the text that reflects the direction they take. The paper web sites are presented both visually and aurally to the class, and they serve as a springboard for discussion about the text. Work on the paper web site helps students to move away from a search for a static meaning of a text by showing ฀ Page 410 ฀ Journal of Literacy Research | v37.3  that not only do different groups make completely different responses to the text but also that different meanings enrich their understandings of the text and of themselves. Fleckenstein’s unique and thought-provoking text provides educators with ideas about literacy that serve to break down and dissolve, or at least cause us to question, boundaries. What is literacy? What influences how we and our students practice literacy? If we become aware of those influences, how should our awareness change the way we teach and the texts we choose for students to read and write? In addition, Fleckenstein’s work is invaluable in helping students and teachers to either break out of inhibiting patterns of schooled literacy or to become aware of those patterns as a step toward effectively using them. Fleckenstein moves beyond the multiliteracies framework articulated by the New London Group (2000) in two ways. First, she places that framework in a classroom setting, providing examples of her own pedagogical techniques that mesh with multiple forms of literacy. Second, she articulates how viewing literacies as multiple has implications for the processes of reading — how texts get read — and conversely, how bodies, places, cultures, and time impact on both those processes and the texts that are read and written. Combining Fleckenstein’s broad, inclusive, and thoughtful understanding of literacy with her description of an ecology of meaning has potential to enable literacy researchers and educators to keep pace with the movement in our society toward a technology-dependent and fragmented globalized society. Fleckenstein has written a dense but valuable book that can help us to see beyond the borders we have constructed between reading and writing, between literacy and bodies/cultures/places/times, between text and image, and between theory and practice. Seeing past those borders is a first step toward helping our students to be prepared to be participants in our rapidly changing world. References New London Group. (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 9-37). New York: Routledge. ฀ Page 411  Book Review  Rosenblatt, L. (1983). Literature as exploration (4th ed.). New York: Modern Language Association. Smagorinsky, P., & O’Donnell-Allen, C. (1998). Reading as mediated and mediating action: Composing meaning for literature through multimedia interpretive texts. Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 198-226. ฀ Page 412

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