Ways of knowing

It has been argued that the aesthetic is a distinctive ‘way of knowing’ that integrates the cognitive and the affective. In school systems, cultivating this way of knowing has traditionally been the province of literature study. As a result literary fiction has occupied a central position in the liberal arts curriculum but, until recently, less attention has been given to newer forms of narrative. Students participation in digital culture brings challenges in description since their responses often involve them ‘playing the text’, producing meaning through both text and embodied action in ways that draw on narratives and themes in other forms and on other platforms, constituting part of the wider mediascape . But this is suggestive of the need for a literacy curriculum that can: help students to articulate transmedia connections; foster understandings of how texts draw on the affordances of different modes; provide a metalanguage that is helpful in the appreciation of how texts work and how texts and related materials position readers, players and consumers - not one that makes the study of narrative an option.