The Gateway to New Composition...
Why AM I HERE?
Montage Theory in an alternative way of looking at teaching, text, and film in a world of dominating technology. Meaning may not just be understood as just black and white text. It can be a chaotic environment in which creative learning is born, using Image, Graphics, and Text seamlessly.
Greetings, Visitor. We hope you enjoy your stay with us as you wonder through the mansion of visual learning.
In the 21st century technology is greatly shaping the education process. Through teaching styles, textbooks, and film, educators and critics will have to redefine the term 'education.'
The GUEST ROSTER: Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius in their article on visual culture, affirm the shifts of composition through the use of montage and other similar artwork: "These mediums represent acts of perception as disjunctive associations between and among cultural experiences - dissociations, which enable spectators to participate in the creation of meaningful yet mutable conjunctions" (304). In other words, meaning is arrived at through juxtaposition by which people groups can communicate.
Sometimes we have to read (or look) between the lines...
Gunther Kress: Reading has to be reconsidered NOW for it was constructed in an age where people consented to text being dominant and authoritative, parallelled with the conjoined "constellation" of the book (p.17).
"Writing is in full Technicolor; it is non-linear and alive with sounds, voices and images of all kinds" (p. 4,5) Andrea Lunsford, from Remixing Composition (2012) by Jason Palmeri
Composition "ToolKits"
Color schemes, paragraphs, and writing are just the tools by which meaning is arrived at. "Writing may give you meaning beyond what's going on" but meaning must not be lost when moving from one technique to the next (Kress, Youtube).
Tools of Composition can change from one technique to the next. Are you using the right ones?
Shipka's Towards A Composition Made Whole (2011, p. 39, 133)
Composition must...
1. Observe "embodied activity and co-practice" among teachers and students.
2. Embrace the extracurricular spaces students occupy
3. Adapt to new practices, and reinvent what writing means
4. Avoid over-dependence on tradition, nostalgia and the outlook that multimodality and montage theory is merely artistic or expressive.
Coincidence or Design?
Alexander and Rhodes (2014) state multimodality and new media allows for alternative stimulation in composition and so we can "know differently" (p.43)
Practicioners of new media studies are now students as well as teachers, "Prosumers" who have access to technology that was only at one time available to the highly trained (p.106).
The Library is in this direction!