Deep Center is a lab where kids learn the joys and power of language, leadership, and creative engagement with their community.
Language literacy experts talk about literacy as being “multimodal.”
This means that language and visual and other literacies develop in tandem–not by themselves. Deep Center’s programs are aligned with what the research shows: that kids understand and make meaning in their worlds through a variety of ways, including language. We have learned this through partnerships with National Writing Project and Red Clay Writing Project, and by aligning our work with English Language Arts standards set by the National Council of Teachers of English.
Deep works with visual modes of literacy because it helps to build language literacy.
Knowing that, this is the kind of cool stuff we do:
Block by Block authors interviewed their family members over Thanksgiving, asking them to tell the story they rarely tell anyone. Then Block by Block youth rendered those stories visually, focusing on details of character and setting. Then today they began using these visual depictions as the foundation for creative written versions of the stories.
Oh yeah, and in the middle of this process, they checked out some Basquiat paintings to see how wondrous things can happen when you smash words and images together.
Multimodal, baby.