I’m getting ready to get out the door for the holidaze, but before I go, I have to make a link to the NCTE Multi-Modal Literacies site, something I stumbled across via John Walter’s blog. This is a potentially interesting site to me for at least two reasons. First, it’s right up the alley of something I ought to mention in a version of English 516, and one of my (oh too many) goals for the Thanksgiving “break” will be to start getting a version of that class ready for online consumption.
Second, it speaks to the sort of weird way that NCTE speaks about these things. “Multi-Modal” strikes me as an odd phrase, as does the language that is NCATE/NCTE-related, the phrase “non-print texts.” This is the term used again and again in one of the documents about accrediting secondary teachers in English, a document my department has been paying a lot of attention to lately because we have several hundred majors in this area. I understand what NCATE and NCTE are trying to achieve with these phrases, but both muli-modal and non-print strike me as, well, odd phrases.
But maybe that’s just me.