Literacy Narratives: Conclusions and Lessons Learned

What will draw future teacher-researchers to initiatives like DMAC and the DALN are opportunities to explore motivations for multimodal production and the ways that personal experiences with literacy have shaped those motivations and pedagogical approaches. As Harris and Ianetta demonstrate, expanded understandings of literacy and narrative seem to depend on a willingness to rethink the genre of literacy narrative and the process by which we construct literate identities. Moreover, another intersection between Harris and Ianetta’s narratives is especially relevant to graduate students: By building a literacy of literacy narratives a la Ianetta, we can make cultural connections like Harris did with “American Pie” to extant conversations in literacy studies. Literacy metaphors and narratives like Harris and Ianetta's can serve as an impetus for the creation and maintenance of graduate students' own literate identites and practices within the field. Literacy and its narration are certainly parts of our scholarly culture, so to progress toward a more critical disposition, we must interpret our own narrative acts and literate practices as well as interrogate our motivations for literacy sponsorship.

Harris’ narrative also hints at the benefits of multimodal pedagogy, providing a model and inspiration for using audio materials (i.e., DALN content) in contemporary pedagogy. As a student, he made multiple sensory connections with music, indicating “it was just exhilarating because I can remember him wheeling the record player into class. . . . We would listen to a verse, and we would start to talk about what it meant.” For Harris, this lesson yielded an understanding of and produced an excitement for interpretive acts. To use Harris' metaphor, music has an absorbent effect on the listener, so modeling its interpretation as a literate practice is a useful pedagogical approach. Clearly, the DALN is replete with data in the form of models and materials for making meaning in the classroom.

Being aware that tradition sometimes serves as a constraint is critical, and Ianetta’s rejection of the ways in which other narrators—“especially graduate students as learned people who were blessed by books from day one”—present themselves is a helpful reminder. In accord with Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch 2012),

we must learn to ask new and different questions and to find more and better ways to listen to the multidimensional voices that are speaking from within and across many of the lines that might divide us as language users—by social and political hierarchies, geography, material circumstances, ideologies, time and space, and the like. (p. 4)

The conventional literacy narrative provided Ianetta no method of expression, so she employs literacy as a catalyst for meta-analysis: “literacy narratives . . . put a frame on literacy itself that sort of tucks in all the corners and cuts off all the loose ends.” Problematizing the genre of literacy narratives and the expectations of audiences yields fresh perspectives about literacy, providing prospective contributors threads to draw from as they construct their own literate identities—in their professions, institutions, lives, and experiences with institutes like DMAC.