Saturday, July 8, 2006

New London Group, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"

*New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies." Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Future. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. New York: Routledge, 2000. 9-37.

"Designing social futures" comes not only as this first chapter's subtitle but also as the second phrase in the subtitle of the NLG's larger book: Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. The New London Group is concerned with the proliferation of information, its circulation in multiple channels, including mass media, and, as well, the ability of education to prepare students for life in the face of unprecedented waves of information. Specifically, they focus on three scenes or phases of life: working lives, public lives (citizenship), and personal lives (or lifeworlds). In accounting for each of these scenes or phases, they hint at notions of network understanding, particularly intermixed with digital encounters (Ulmer's electracy, noted in one margin).

To put it another way, one of the questions motivating the NLG's work might be: How have new and emerging information technologies reconstituted the literacies most viable for work, citizenship and personal life? How must schooling respond?

"Local diversity and global connectedness mean not only that there can be no standard; they also mean that the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects; variations in register that occur according to social context; hybrid cross-cultural discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects, or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; and variations in the gestural relationships among people, language, and material objects" (14). Consider this alongside Canagarajah's notion corrective, code meshing. This also bears on the emphasis on futures and the static quality of standards.

The second major consideration of the essay (beyond that changing contours of literacy in work, citizen-publics and personal lives) is schooling: What schools do and what we can do in schools.

"The role of pedagogy is to develop an epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to erase or leave behind different subjectivities. This has to be the basis of a new norm" (18). The new norm relies heavily on notions of pedagogy as "design." This, they break into three sub-sets: available design, design and the redesigned. This reminds me of the tension Urban sets up between accelerative and inertial forces in culture (Metaculture). Available Designs are precursors and antecedent forces; Design is agency, in effect, and the redesigned accounts for what comes of the dialectical relationship.

"Our view of mind, society, and learning is based on the assumption that the human mind is embodied, situated and social" (30). This stance folds together four teaching activities: situated practice (33), overt instruction (33), critical framing (34), and transforming practice (situated, reflective) (35).

Related sources:

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. 1916. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Halliday, M.A.K., Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning, Baltimore: University Park Press, 1978; London: Edward Arnold, 1978.

Posted by Derek Mueller at July 8, 2006 8:01 PM to Writing Technologies