Description
Context is everything and, as Marshall McLuhan stated over half a century ago, the medium is the message. Meaning is not only shaped and determined by context, but by the very medium through which the message is delivered. This is as true now as in McLuhan’s time, though now in a more technological society, as the medium has become increasingly multimodal and the context even more kaleidoscopic, the greater the potential that meaning is muddled or hidden. This poses a challenge to educators to help students navigate this extremely complex context. Such a multi-faceted context is perhaps nowhere more acute than in the Arabian Gulf, where oil-wealth has created a confluence of cultures, digital technologies, and sophisticated multi-media marketing. Surprisingly, very little has been written on this regional phenomenon. How to makes sense of meaning in this multicultural, technology-rich, media-saturated environment needs to be addressed in academia and in the classroom.This paper will describe how Kuwait epitomizes the ways by which technology in general is working against education, as well as ways it is providing opportunities to enhance it, via new literacies. It will discuss the problem of “technique” raised in Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, a little understood but arguably crucially important critique of technology, and describe practical pedagogical uses of technology as a way to mitigate this problem. In particular, it will describe the use of various literacies and technologies in a Kuwaiti freshman English classroom for students to analyze multimodal meaning through reading and writing tasks. I argue that these tasks not only help develop new literacies, but that they also help students develop the traditional academic skills of critical thinking and reading and writing across the disciplines, thus preparing students to be engaged, thoughtful participants in an increasingly wired, multimodal world. In addition, this study of how new literacies can be used in the classroom in Kuwait sheds hopeful light on possible ways to counter the pessimistic implications of Ellul’s Technological Society anywhere.
| Period | 21 Apr 2015 → 23 Apr 2015 |
|---|---|
| Event title | “Challenges of Teaching Foreign Language and Literature” Gulf University of Science and Technology English Language & Literature Second International Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Kuwait City, KuwaitShow on map |