A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Learning by Design

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137539724
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: German Language

The concept of 'Multiliteracies' has gained increasing influence since it was coined by the New London Group in 1994. This collection edited by two of the original members of the group brings together a representative range of authors, each of whom has been involved in the application of the pedagogy of Multiliteracies.

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The Things You Do to Know: An Introduction to the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

After a brief history of the context and evolution of the idea of Multiliteracies, this chapter focuses on its pedagogy. Originally framed as Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing, and Transformed Practice, these four orientations were subsequently translated in the Learning by Design project into the ‘Knowledge Processes’ of Experiencing, Conceptualizing, Analyzing and Applying. The chapter explores the roots of these orientations in what it characterizes as ‘didactic’ and ‘authentic’ pedagogies. Learning by Design is by comparison ‘reflexive’, combining elements of each of these traditions into a new synthesis. The chapter goes on to spell out the pedagogical specifics of each of the Knowledge Processes, then their epistemological basis as distinctive kinds of ‘knowledge-action’. We conclude by contrasting the cognitive emphases of both didactic and authentic pedagogy with the epistemological theory of learning that underpins Learning by Design. Its focus is on action rather than cognition—not what we know, but the things we do to know.

Towards a pedagogy of Multiliteracies

The short history of a word

‘Literacy’ is a term that presents itself as emphatic and singular. The emphatic part accompanies the modern insistence that everyone has at least ‘basic’ levels of competency in reading and writing. ‘Literacy’ in this sense means some quite definite things to be acquired: to read the ordinary texts of modern society—newspapers, information books, novels; to be able to write using correct spelling and grammar; and to appreciate high-cultural values through exposure to a taste of the literary canon. The singular part arises when literacy is presented as a single, official or standard form of language, one right way to write, and an idealized canon of authors conventionally considered ‘great’.

By the mid-1990s, the emphatic and singular connotations of the term ‘literacy’ were beginning to work not-so-well. The mass media and then the internet spawned whole new genres of text which meant that narrowly conventional understandings of literacy were fast becoming anachronistic. Also, the forces of globalization and manifest local diversity increasingly juxtaposed modes of meaning making that were sharply different from each other. The challenge of learning to communicate in this new environment was to navigate the differences, rather than to learn to communicate in the same ways. Besides, it was becoming obvious that traditional literacy pedagogy was not working to achieve its stated goal of providing social opportunity. Inequalities in education were growing, suggesting that something needed to be done in literacy pedagogy to address this.

It was in this context that the New London Group came together to consider the current state and possible future of literacy pedagogy. Convened by Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, the group also consisted of Courtney Cazden, Norman Fairclough, Jim Gee, Gunther Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, and Martin Nakata. The group’s initial deliberations—a week-long meeting in September 1994—produced an article-long manifesto (New London Group 1996), and then an edited book (Cope and Kalantzis 2000) which included the original article. In 2009, in consultation with other members of the group, Cope and Kalantzis published a paper reflecting on subsequent developments (Cope and Kalantzis 2009); then in 2012 they produced a book outlining the theory and practice in greater detail (Kalantzis and Cope 2012a).

To capture the essence of the changes that the group felt needed to be addressed, we coined the term ‘Multiliteracies’. A Google search 20 years later shows 196,000 web pages that mention the word. Google Scholar says that 12,700 scholarly articles and books mention Multiliteracies. Amazon has 193 books with the word in their title. At the time, we never imagined that the idea could become this widely used.

The broader context for the Multiliteracies work was the development at the same time of the New Literacy Studies, prominently involving Brian Street (Street 1995), James Gee (Gee 1996), and David Barton (Barton 2007). The idea of Multiliteracies also represents a coming together of related ideas developed before and since by members of the New London Group: Courtney Cazden (Cazden 1983; Cazden 2001; Cazden 2006; Luke et al. 2004), Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope (Kalantzis and Cope 2012b; Kalantzis and Cope 2015a; Kalantzis and Cope 2015b), Norman Fairclough (Fairclough 1995a; Fairclough 1995b; Fairclough 2001), Jim Gee (Gee 2003; Gee 2004; Gee 2014), Gunther Kress (Kress 2003; Kress 2009; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), Allan Luke (Luke 1994; Luke 1996a; Luke 2008), Carmen Luke (Luke 1995; Luke 1996b; Luke and Gore 1992), Sarah Michaels (Michaels 2005; Michaels et al. 1993; Michaels et al. 2005), and Martin Nakata (Nakata 2001a; Nakata 2001b; Nakata 2007).

In short: the Multiliteracies thesis

The ‘Multiliteracies’ argument has three components, framed as the ‘why’ of Multiliteracies, the ‘what’ of Multiliteracies, and the ‘how’ of Multiliteracies. This book is only about the ‘how’ or the pedagogy of Multiliteracies. By way of background, here is a quick summary of the first two parts of the argument.

In the ‘why’ part of the argument, we outlined the dramatic changes occurring in everyday life in the realms of work, citizenship, and identity. These changes render older practices of literacy pedagogy increasingly anachronistic. This argument is expanded in Chapter 2 of our Literacies book (Kalantzis and Cope 2012a), and Chapters 3 to 5 of our New Learning book (Kalantzis and Cope 2012c).

On the subject of the ‘what’ of Multiliteracies, we add two ‘multis’ to ‘literacies’: the ‘multi-’ of enormous and significant differences in contexts and patterns of communication, and the ‘multi-’ of multimodality. In the case of the first of these ‘multi-’s, the Multiliteracies notion sets out to address the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or domain-specific contexts. This means that it is no longer enough for literacy teaching to focus solely on the rules of standard forms of the national language. Rather, communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners become able to negotiate differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another. These differences are the consequence of any number of factors, including culture, gender, life experience, subject matter, social or subject domain, and the like. Every meaning exchange is cross-cultural to a certain degree.

The other ‘multi-’ response to the question of the ‘what’ of Multiliteracies arises in part from the characteristics of the new information and communications media. Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal—in which written-linguistic modes of meaning interface with oral, visual, audio, gestural, tactile, and spatial patterns of meaning. This means that we need to extend the range of literacy pedagogy so that it does not unduly privilege alphabetical representations. Supplementing these, the Multiliteracies approach suggests bringing multimodal texts, and particularly those typical of the new, digital media, into the curriculum and classroom. This makes literacy pedagogy all the more relevant and engaging for its manifest connections with today’s communications milieu. It also provides a powerful foundation for synesthesia, or learning that emerges from mode switching, moving backwards and forwards between representations in text, image, sound, gesture, object, and space. A burgeoning literature has emerged in the area of multimodality, most prominently in the work of Gunther Kress (Kress 2009; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), Theo van Leeuwen (van Leeuwen 2008), and Ron Scollon (Scollon 2001). Our own account of multimodality is to be found in our forthcoming book, Making Sense: A Grammar of Multimodality.

This book is about the third part of the Multiliteracies argument, the ‘how’ of a pedagogy of Multiliteracies. In the original formulations of the New London Group, the following major dimensions of literacy pedagogy were identified: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. In applying these ideas to curriculum practices over the past decade, we have reframed these ideas somewhat and translated them into the more immediately recognizable ‘Knowledge Processes’: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying (Kalantzis and Cope 2010). Whichever terminology is used to categorize learning activity types, the essential idea in the Multiliteracies approach is that learning is a process of ‘weaving’ backwards and forwards across and between different pedagogical moves (Luke et al. 2004):

• Situated practice/experiencing: Human cognition is situated. It is contextual. Meanings are grounded in real-world patterns of experience, action, and subjective interest (Gee 2004). One key pedagogical weaving is between school learning and the practical out-of-school experiences of learners. Another is between familiar and unfamiliar texts and experiences. These kinds of cross-connections between school and the rest of life Cazden calls ‘cultural weavings’ (Cazden 2006).

• Overt instruction/conceptualizing: Specialized, disciplinary knowledges are based on finely tuned distinctions of concept and theory, typical of those developed by expert communities of practice. Conceptualizing is not merely a matter of teacherly or textbook telling based on legacy academic disciplines, but a Knowledge Process in which the learners become active conceptualizers, making the tacit explicit and generalizing from the particular. In the case of Multiliteracies teaching and learning, overt instruction/conceptualizing involves the development of a metalanguage to describe ‘design elements’.

• Critical framing/analyzing: Powerful learning also entails a certain kind of critical capacity. ‘Critical’ can mean two things in a pedagogical context—to analyze functions, or to be evaluative with respect to relationships of power (Cazden 2006). In the case of a pedagogy of Multiliteracies, this involves analyzing text functions and critically interrogating the interests of participants in the communication process.

• Transformed practice/applying: This entails the application of knowledge and understandings to the complex diversity of real-world situations. In the case of Multiliteracies, this means making texts and putting them to use in communicative action.

The evolution of this pedagogical framework has occurred through a number of stages. A significant focal point in this evolution has been the Learning by Design project. This project commenced in Australia in 2000 when we were at RMIT University in Melbourne, with the support of a series of grants from the Australian Research Council. As part of this project, we developed a Microsoft Word lesson documentation template in which teachers collaboratively mapped out teaching plans around the activity types identified by the Knowledge Processes, taught to these plans, revised them based on their teaching experience, and shared them as a lasting record of their pedagogical experiences. Since we moved to the University of Illinois in 2006, we have received a number of grants to continue this work from the Institute of Educational Sciences in the US Department of Education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2008–2010, we created a new online web planner in which many hundreds of Learning Modules were created in the US, Australia, and Greece. Then, with the development of our Scholar online learning platform since 2010, Learning Module development and publication has moved there. This book includes the work of colleagues who have been engaged in the Multiliteracies pedagogy since the beginning of the Learning by Design project, as well as others who have come to explore the pedagogy more recently.

Figure 1.1 Mapping the original Multiliteracies pedagogy against the ‘Knowledge Processes’

Figure 1.2 Learning Modules in the Scholar Bookstore (www.cgscholar.com)

The question of pedagogy

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