Multiliteracies in Motion

Current Theory and Practice

David R. Cole, Darren Lee Pullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780415801577
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135184322
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The realities of new technological and social conditions since the 1990s demand a new approach to literacy teaching. Looking onward from the original statement of aims of the multiliteracies movement in 1996, this volume brings together top-quality scholarship and research that has embraced the notion and features new contributions by many of the originators of this approach to literacy.

Drawing on large research projects and empirical evidence, the authors explore practical and educational issues that relate to multiliteracies, such as assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. The viewpoint taken is that multiliteracies is a complementary socio-cultural approach to the new literacies that includes pedagogy and learning. The differences are addressed from a multiliteracies perspective – one that does not discount or undermine the new literacies, but shows new ways in which they are complementary.

Computers and the internet are transforming the way we work and communicate and the very notion of literacy itself. This volume offers frontline information and a vital update for those wishing to understand the evolution of multiliteracies and the current state of literacy theory in relation to it.

1
Introduction to Multiliteracies in Motion

Current Theory and Practice

David R. Cole, University of Technology, Sydney and Darren L. Pullen, University of Tasmania

Introduction

Western civilization stands at a turning point. On one side of this point are the structures and forms that have upheld its institutions and systems in the past. On the other stands possible ways forward that address the complicated situation of the present, where global economic fluctuations dominate social life in ever more powerful ways, and the purposes and through-lines for educational practice are increasingly more obscure given these tremendous fluctuations. One might legitimately ask the question: Why turn back the clock and re-examine the notion of “multiliteracies,” that was positioned by the New London Group in 1996 as a useful term to give sense to the ways in which literacy practice is colliding with new technological modes of representation and shifting heterogeneous demographics? To answer this question one must consider the changes that are taking place in the educational world, and the ways in which literacy practice has dealt with these changes through classroom innovation, research into best practice, and theorizations of the critical factors that are animating change and making change more than a rhetorical call to arms for politicians or system managers intent on improving efficiency or introducing new technology due to commercial concerns. Change has become closely aligned with all aspects of literacy through the ways in which education has necessarily evolved under pressure from oscillating financial circumstances, and the adaptive and flexible elements inherent within multiliteracies make it a well-designated fit to keep on explaining continual literacy morphology. In this first section, we will explain the elastic connection between multiliteracies and changing literacies.

Multiliteracies in Motion

The first element that has determined that the notion of multiliteracies has survived beyond its initial conception is the multiple part of the idea. Multiple doesn’t mean infinite, nor does it mean a vague number more than one. Multiple means a definite number of factors that converge on one point of literate behavior. For example, literacy instruction has been dominated by the reading and writing of printed text for a number of years. Students are asked to read a printed text and write out answers that explain their understanding of the text. This type of activity—called reading comprehension—has also come to dominate literacy examinations of basic skills. In terms of multiliteracies, the questions inherent within reading comprehension exercises are expanded beyond a dualistic notion of reading and writing, and include aspects such as visual literacy if images are involved in the source material, and critical literacy, that is the purposeful questioning of text for prejudice or silences and that might determine the political or social usage of the text in question. Multiliteracies is therefore a platform for the multiple elements that converge in educational practice as it is performed in formal and informal situations.

The second element of design that has allowed multiliteracies to remain in motion beyond its conception concerns the potential division between formal and informal learning situations. Research in this field has established that learning can happen in groups, and can be associated with informal, social and any loosely connected activity between participants (Hager & Smith, 2004). For example, many youths all over the world now learn a plethora of skills through multi-level gaming activity played on the Internet. They learn by competing together in virtual worlds practically unimaginable in 1996, which are rapidly being transformed by participant demand for new challenges and different ways to meet online via sophisticated role-play and imaginative scenarios. The technology that accompanies these games is being developed at a rapid speed, and is an area of learning driven by demand and the new ways in which digital technology offers rapid virtual interconnection on multiple simultaneous levels (Cole, 2007, 2005a). Multiliteracies incorporates this dramatic development in learning potential through the notion that social futures are being decided in the playing out of multiple literate behaviors. This idea of the New London Group accompanies the more recent development of the “new literacies” (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear & Leu, 2008), which aim to map this new terrain of technologically mediated social connections, yet remains beyond the new literacies in that the map that may be produced by the accumulation of many new literacies still counts for something according to multiliteracies: i.e., a social future.

The notion of multiliteracies therefore contains a subtle yet important idea of power that has also allowed it to remain in motion. At the time of the conception of multiliteracies, the Internet was the new power broker, and theorists gave it dramatic and unqualified affordances—summed up through terms such as “global village” or “online communities” (Cole, 2005b). As the technology of the Internet moved out of purely academic and high-level commercial use, and became a familiar node of access for all offices, schools and homes, social scientists tried to track this movement and give it names that reflected the new societal groupings that were emerging. This process became embroiled within what became known as the “rhetoric of the technological sublime” (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006), where new social terminology and modes of explanation were interwoven with new types of interactivity and communication sparked by digitized technological development. At base, the naming and understanding of all new Internet communities and modes of socialization are offshoots of this “entanglement.” In contrast, established forms of power have been strikingly untouched by whatever new digitally augmented forms of socializing have emerged. For example, the power structures and hierarchical formations that are apparent through schooling have not changed due to the emergence of the global Internet. Universities have diversified and expanded to a certain extent via modes of distance learning, where students can complete degrees by using virtual portals, online material, and taking part in academic chat forums. However, even this activity is strangely reminiscent of the types of learning that were already apparent in universities before the Internet came into being. Assignments are still marked in the same ways, and academic careers are guided by highly structured and enforced types of criteria for advancement. So how does this relate to multiliteracies and the type of power that it entails?

Multiliteracies does not use the metaphors and analogies of online connectivity to hypothesize new societal tendencies. If one takes the virtual world that is represented by the Internet as a starting point, it could be said that it is complete in itself, as everything about it works through the way in which the connection has been established. Online dating works through the age-old processes of attraction and repulsion. Finding work on the Internet still requires a follow-up interview, a well-designed CV, and positive body language and appearance once contact between employers and potential employees has been established. Complete power relationships are therefore outside of the sphere of influence of the new literacies. Yet the new literacies are immanent to the power relationships that occur due to connectivity that one might discover online and by degrees in the ways in which society as a whole is changing. So there is a latent form of power inherent in the literacies that occur due to the net, and this has had an impact on social life. Multiliteracies sums this type of latency up by positing positive steps towards a better social life, rather than by establishing idealistic revolution due to digital innovation. For example, multiliteracies are concerned with the establishment of civil and pluralistic society, and this will happen through strengthening educational mores. The method for doing this is exemplified by the way in which the initial argument was constructed, and this is another element that has made multiliteracies endure and has put it into motion.

This element is the fact that the New London Group (1996) were comprised of an aggregate of 10 multidisciplinary individuals. Academics came together from the fields of linguistics, education, literary analysis, the sociology of education, and cultural studies. This richness has colored the argument from the start, and given depth and a broad perspective that could be added to in the future. Multiliteracies is in motion because it may be applied to other fields of interest such as diversity studies or organizational theory. This makes multiliteracies by its very nature expansionary and emergent. The coming together of diverse intellectual concerns has not become stuck in a dead end of redundant thought. This is also a function of the fact that there is much detail to add to the construction of the multiliteracies argument. This has happened over time, and in particular by the series of essays contained in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). This current volume fills in more of the gaps in the argument, as the authors of this collection are also interdisciplinary and concerned with similar aspects of emergent literacy practice. This parallel focus brings to the fore the last element of change that has cast multiliteracies into motion, and has to a certain extent defined one of its central concerns. That is the way in which meaning can be made through literate behavior.

There is a particular tension in Western literacy teaching that the New London Group successfully characterized. It could be argued that children are sheltered from the realities of the learning that takes place in literacy through fairy stories, phonics and set-piece skills exercises that are designed to enhance their use of language. Progressive educationalists have updated this picture, and pointed out that the use of language corresponds to context and social correspondences in terms of being meaningful (Kress, 2006). The notion of multiliteracies builds upon the progressivist perspective of education by deciding upon the design of social futures as giving literate behavior the most cogent meaning. Students should, according to this perspective, be engaged in actively designing their social futures when “doing literacy.” The multiliteracies movement therefore has consequences in terms of text choice, text analysis, and textual synthesis and representation. All of this work has to be integrated into the design of social futures, which are continually rushing into the fields of knowledge of students and teachers as society progresses, and new social conditions become apparent. Literacy is, according to multiliteracies, deeply dependent on social–cultural factors that are always in motion, and often have unknown trajectories, especially given the current dramatic economic fluctuations that are presently starting to determine new models of work and communication.

Current Theory and Practice

The notion of multiliteracies has endured and it is in motion due to the elements listed and explained above, but what makes it particularly pertinent to be included in a collection of chapters about current literacy theory and practice such as this volume? The attribute that perhaps best suits multiliteracies to the contemporary educational scene is its ability to absorb and integrate with other theories of education that are crowding in on practice in terms of having commonly understood explicatory power. One such theory is “affect theory.” Affect theory has a long history in Western thought, dating back at least to the work of Baruch Spinoza (1677/1993). It looks to explain the ways in which emotions work in human cognition by making connections between the mind, desire, rationality, language, and the unconscious. Affects have been theorized as possessing a charge or relative power above their position as connective devices between operative points in human communicative functioning (Fiumara, 2001). This potential has allowed affects to be positioned as points of intensity in various fields of inquiry such as literary analysis (Holland, 1968), social cognition (Forgas, 2001), psychoanalysis (Freud, 1953) and human geography (Thrift, 2004). The multidisciplinary nature of affect theory also makes it suitable for education in terms of lending explicative power to a teacher’s work.

This is where one might discern a connection between multiliteracies and affect theory. Multiliteracies is also about the work of teachers, but addresses it through the ways in which pedagogical mores may be understood as being in motion from “overt instruction” to “transformed practice.” Transformed practice is when a teacher is able to switch between available curricula designs and assimilate their teaching style with the social–cultural factors that are determining the behavior of the cohort in any particular context (including the use of digital technology). Affect theory is also about change, but acts as a vital connection between the internal state of the teacher (how they are feeling) and the social–cultural consequences of their actions (Hargreaves, 1994). For example, a teacher that is feeling overwhelmed and drowning in the behavioral issues of a particular class will have less impact in terms of making knowledge work to the benefit of that cohort. Both affect theory and multiliteracies are therefore critically determined by issues of power and shifting social–cultural factors. This important relationship in current literacy theory and practice is represented below:

Figure 1.1 shows how multiliteracies and affect theory may be conjoined through a concern for power in education, and this conjunction is played out in literacy classrooms. This perspective on current literacy theory and practice is further updated by adding the development of Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) (Masny & Cole, 2009) to the fold. The forward motion of Multiliteracies Power Affect theory

Figure 1.1 The Relationship between Multiliteracies and Affect Theory.

multiliteracies is hindered somewhat by the possible homogenizing effects of stipulating that the multiple aspects of literacy are tied to literacy in terms of multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Multimodality is the switching potential inherent in different modes of literate progression, and owes its heritage to genre theory and systemic functional linguistics. This part of multiliteracies is potentially homogenizing as there is something posited behind the switching mechanism, such as experience, agency, or identity. In contrast, MLT has multiplicities at the center of its construction of literacy and the different modes of literate behavior that may pass through any teaching and learning situation defined as “life.” MLT also employs affect theory to help with the construction and representation of literacy as a fully multiple development. Investigations into writing systems for young literacy learners have shown that the emotional impact of environmental circumstances is a major component of becoming literate (Masny, 2006). Multiliteracies benefits from such insights taken from MLT as current theory and practice in the field of literacy continues to uncover how the multiplicity of literacies that are presently being named and explicated may be deployed in education, and what the consequences are in terms of becoming truly “multiply literate” today.

The Chapters of the Book

This book is a collective coll...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction to Multiliteracies in Motion
• Part I Classrooms and Multiliteracies in Motion
• Part II Multiliteracies Theory in Motion
• Part III The Pedagogy of Multiliteracies in Motion
• Part IV Multiliteracies in Practice
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index