Multiliteracies: Lit Learning

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134611836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Multiliteracies considers the future of literacy teaching in the context of the rapidly changing English language. Questions are raised about what constitutes appropriate literacy teaching in today's world: a world that is both a global village yet one which local diversity is increasingly important.

This is a coherent and accessible overview of the work of the New London Group, with well-known international contributors bringing together their varying national experiences and differences of theoretical and political emphasis. The essays deal with issues such as:

• the fundamental premises of literacy pedagogy
• the effects of technological change
• multilingualism and cultual diversity
• social futures and their implications on language teaching.

The book concludes with case studies of attempts to put the theories into practice and thereby provides a basis for dialogue with fellow educators around the world.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Multiliteracies: the beginnings of an idea

Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

In September 1994, a small group of people—mostly professional colleagues and friends who had worked with one another over the years—met for a week in the small town of New London, New Hampshire, to consider the future of literacy teaching; to discuss what would need to be taught in a rapidly changing near future, and how this should be taught.

As it turned out, there were multiple ironies in the very idea of New London. Now one billion people speak that difficult and messy little language, English, spoken four centuries ago by only about a million or so people in the vicinity of London, old London. The story of the language, and the story of the last few centuries, including its many injustices, is the story of many new Londons. This issue—how the language meets with cultural and linguistic diversity—was one of our main concerns. Then there was the irony of the postcard serenity of this particular New London, the affluent, post-industrial village which produces little more than its idyllic eighteenth-century postcard image. This, in a world where the fundamental mission of educators is to improve every child’s educational opportunities—a world which, much of the time, is far from idyllic.

This seemed a strange place to be asking some of the hardest questions we now face as educators. What constitutes appropriate literacy teaching in the context of the ever more critical factors of local diversity and global connectedness? As educators addressing the difficult question of cultural and linguistic diversity, we do so against a background cacophony of claims and counterclaims about the canon of great literature, about grammar and about the need to get ‘back-to-basics’. These debates seemed a long way from the calm hills of a tourist’s New Hampshire but they were at the forefront of our minds during that fruitful meeting.

Ten people met and talked for that week in New London. Courtney Cazden, from the United States, has spent a long and highly influential career working on classroom discourse, on language learning in multilingual contexts, and, most recently, on literacy pedagogy. Bill Cope, from

Australia, has written curricula addressing cultural diversity in schools, and researched literacy pedagogy and the changing cultures and discourses of workplaces. Norman Fairclough, as a theorist of language and social meaning from Great Britain, is particularly interested in linguistic and discursive change as part of social and cultural change. James Gee, from the United States, is a leading researcher and theorist on language and mind, and on the language and learning demands of the latest ‘fast capitalist’ workplaces. Mary Kalantzis, from Australia, has been involved in experimental social education and literacy curriculum projects, and is particularly interested in citizenship education. Gunther Kress, from Great Britain, is best known for his work on language and learning, semiotics, visual literacy, and the multimodal literacies that are increasingly important to all communication, particularly the mass media. Allan Luke, from Australia, is a researcher and theorist of critical literacy who has brought sociological analysis to bear on the teaching of reading and writing. Carmen Luke, also from Australia, has written extensively on feminist pedagogy. Sarah Michaels, from the United States, has had extensive experience in developing and researching programmes of classroom learning in urban settings. Martin Nakata, from Australia, has researched and written on the issue of literacy in indigenous communities. Joseph Lo Bianco, Director of Australia’s National Languages and Literacy Institute, was unable to attend but has joined the New London Group in subsequent meetings.

Our purpose for meeting was to engage in the issue of what to do in literacy pedagogy on the basis of our different national and cultural experiences and on the basis of our different areas of expertise. The focus was the big picture; the changing word and the new demands being placed upon people as makers of meaning in changing workplaces, as citizens in changing public spaces and in the changing dimensions of our community lives—our lifeworlds.

Creating a context for the meeting were our differences of national experience and differences of theoretical and political emphasis. For instance, we needed to debate at length the relative importance of immersion and explicit teaching; our differing expert interests in the areas of multimedia, workplace literacies, and cultural and linguistic diversity; and the issue of the extent to which we should compromise with the learning expectations and ethos of new forms of workplace organisation. We engaged in the discussions on the basis of a genuine commitment to collaborative problem-solving, bringing together a team with different knowledge, experiences, and positions in order to optimise the possibility of effectively addressing the complex reality of schools.

Being fully aware of our differences, we all shared the concern that our discussion might not be productive. Yet it was. These differences, combined with our common sense of unease, allowed us to agree on the fundamental problem we needed to address—that is, that the disparities in educational outcomes did not seem to be improving. We agreed that we should get back to the broad question of the social outcomes of language learning, and that we should, on this basis, rethink the fundamental premises of literacy pedagogy in order to influence practices that will give students the skills and knowledge they need to achieve their aspirations. We agreed that, in each of the English-speaking countries we came from, what students needed to learn was changing. Clearly the main element of this change was that there was no singular, canonical English that either could or should be taught any more. Cultural differences and rapidly shifting communications media meant that the very nature of the subject of literacy pedagogy was changing radically.

We decided that the outcomes of our discussions could be encapsulated in one word, ‘Multiliteracies’—a word we chose because it describes two important arguments we might have with the emerging cultural, institutional, and global order. The first argument engages with the multiplicity of communications channels and media; the second with the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity.

The notion of Multiliteracies supplements traditional literacy pedagogy by addressing these two related aspects of textual multiplicity. What we might term ‘mere literacy’ remains centred on language only, and usually on a singular national form of language at that, being conceived as a stable system based on rules such as mastering sound-letter correspondence. This is based on the assumption that we can actually discern and describe correct usage. Such a view of language must characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy. A pedagogy of Multi-literacies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects. In some cultural contexts—in an Aboriginal community or in a multimedia environment, for instance—the visual mode of representation may be much more powerful and closely related to language than ‘mere literacy’ would ever be able to allow. Multiliteracies also creates a different kind of pedagogy: one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes.

Two main arguments, then, emerged in our initial discussions. The first argument relates to the increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioural, and so on. This is particularly important in the mass media, multimedia, and in an electronic hypermedia. Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal—in which written-linguistic modes of meaning are part and parcel of visual, audio, and spatial patterns of meaning. Take for instance the multimodal ways in which meanings are made on the World Wide Web, or in video captioning, or in interactive multimedia, or in desktop publishing, or in the use of written texts in a shopping mall. To find our way around this emerging world of meaning requires a new, multimodal literacy. We may have cause to be sceptical about the sci-fi visions of information superhighways and an impending future in which we are all virtual shoppers. Nevertheless, new communications media are reshaping the way we use language. When technologies of meaning are changing so rapidly, there cannot be one set of standards or skills that constitutes the ends of literacy learning, however taught.

The second argument relates to the realities of increasing local diversity and global connectedness. The news on our television screens screams this message at us every day. And, in more constructive terms, we have to negotiate differences every day, in our local communities and in our increasingly globally interconnected working and community lives. As a consequence, something paradoxical is happening to English. At the same time as it is becoming a lingua mundi, a world language, and a lingua franca, a common language of global commerce, media and politics, English is also breaking into multiple and increasingly differentiated Englishes, marked by accent, national origin, subcultural style and professional or technical communities. Increasingly, the name of the game in English is crossing linguistic boundaries. Gone are the days when learning a single, standard version of the language was sufficient. Migration, multiculturalism and global economic integration daily intensify this process of change. The globalisation of communications and labour markets makes language diversity an ever more critical local issue. Dealing with linguistic differences and cultural differences has now become central to the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives. Effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries. Subcultural diversity also extends to the ever broadening range of specialist registers and situational variations in language, be they technical, sporting, or related to groupings of interest and affiliation. When the proximity of cultural and linguistic diversity is one of the key facts of our time, the very nature of language learning has changed.

These two developments have the potential to transform both the substance and pedagogy of literacy teaching not only in English but also in other languages around the world. No longer do the old pedagogies of a formal, standard, written national language have the utility they once possessed. In contrast, the Multiliteracies argument suggests the necessity of an open-ended and flexible functional grammar which assists language learners to describe language differences (cultural, subcultural, regional/ national, technical, context-specific, and so on) and the multimodal channels of meaning now so important to communication.

Clearly these are fundamental issues concerning our future. In addressing these issues, literacy educators and students must see themselves as active participants in social change; as learners and students who can be active designers—makers—of social futures. We decided at our first meeting, therefore, to begin the discussion with this question of social futures.

Accordingly, the starting point of those discussions and now this book is the shape of social change—changes in our working lives; our public lives as citizens; and our private lives as members of different community lifeworlds. The fundamental question is what do these changes mean for literacy pedagogy? In the context of these changes we must conceptualise the ‘what’ of literacy pedagogy. The key concept we developed to do this is that of Design, in which we are both inheritors of patterns and conventions of meaning while at the same time active designers of meaning. And, as designers of meaning, we are designers of social futures—workplace futures, public futures, and community futures.

In our discussions we developed a theory in which there are six design elements in the meaning-making process: those of Linguistic Meaning, Visual Meaning, Audio Meaning, Gestural Meaning, Spatial Meaning, and the Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes of meaning to each other. Only then can we translate the ‘what’ into a ‘how’. We also considered four components of pedagogy: Situated Practice, which draws on the experience of meaning-making in lifeworlds, the public realm, and workplaces; Overt Instruction, through which students develop an explicit metalanguage of Design; Critical Framing, which interprets the social context and purpose of Designs of meaning; and Transformed Practice, in which students, as meaning-makers, become designers of social futures. And we decided that through the International Multiliteracies Project we would begin to set up collaborative research relationships and programmes of curriculum development that test, exemplify, extend, and rework the ideas we had tentatively explored in New London.

The outcome of the New London meeting was that, as the ‘New London Group’, we developed a jointly authored paper entitled ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures’, which was published in the spring 1996 edition of the Harvard Educational Review (New London Group, 1996). Already the paper has generated enormous international interest.

The structure of this paper, and now this book, evolved from the New London discussions. We began the discussions with an agenda that we had agreed upon in advance, which consisted of a schematic framework of key questions about the forms and content of literacy pedagogy. Over the course of our meeting, we worked through this agenda three times, teasing out difficult points, elaborating on the argument, and adapting the schematic structure that had been originally proposed. One team member typed key points, which were projected on to a screen so we could discuss the wording of a common argument. By the end of the meeting, we had developed the final outline of an argument, which has subsequently become the text of Chapter 1. The various members of the group then returned to their respective countries and institutions, and worked independently on the different sections; the draft was circulated and modified; and, finally, we opened up the paper to public discussion in a series of plenary presentations and small discussion groups led by the team at the Fourth International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference held in Townsville, Australia, in June-July 1995.

In Townsville, we again met as a group for three days, and began to plan this book. This planning continued when next we met, for three days before the Domains of Literacy Conference organised by Gunther Kress at the Institute of Education, University of London in September 1996. Meanwhile, other people had joined in the original discussions and the authorship of this book has now expanded to include Dave Bond from the University of Cape Town; and Denise Newfield and Pippa Stein from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The group met for a fourth time in Alice Springs, Australia, at the Fifth International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference in October 1997 to finalise the book. This book, then, is more than ever a product of international collaboration now extending well beyond the small group who originally met in New London.

Despite being the result of three years’ exhaustive discussions, this book is by no means a finished piece. We still present it here as a programmatic manifesto, which necessarily remains open and tentative. The book, however, does two major things. First, it provides a theoretical overview of the current social context of learning and the consequences of social changes for the content (the ‘what’) as well as the form (the ‘how’) of literacy pedagogy. In this sense, the book is intended as the basis for open-ended dialogue with fellow educators around the world; a framework which will spark ideas for possible new research areas and help frame curriculum experimentation attempting to come to grips with our changing educational environment. Second, it discusses our initial attempts to put the Multiliteracies ideas into curriculum practice. This second aspect of the book represents the work that is still in its early stages. In this process, we hope to set up further collaborative research relationships and programmes of curriculum development that test, exemplify, extend, and rework the ideas tentatively suggested in the initial Harvard Educational Review paper, and now this book.

1
A PEDAGOGY OF MULTILITERACIES

Designing social futures

The New Lond...