Karen Mooney
Professor
Barbara Gleason
English
B6400
December 17,
2013
“A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”: Before and After
In
1994, a group of scholars and educators gathered in New London, Connecticut, to
discuss the interests they shared in the ways in which literacy and teaching
were changing. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” is the
self-described manifesto that emerged from that meeting. In it, they argued
that two historic shifts--the cultural and linguistic diversity fueled by globalization
and the emergence of new communications technologies-- required a new approach
to literacy, one that went beyond the mere reading and writing of words. They
called it “Multiliteracy.” The forces that led to this call for change had been
gathering for decades, and the twenty years since have made it more urgent.
In their introduction to
a book that came out of the conference, Multiliteracies, Cope and Kalantzis
write that there were many ironies about 10 scholars from the English-speaking
world arriving in Rhode Island to search for consensus on what they saw as very
pressing issues (3). For one, the town’s name, New London, reminded them that
four centuries earlier English was spoken by only about a million people
clustered close around London itself. In 1994 when they met, English and its
many variants were spoken by some one billion people scattered across the
globe. A second irony was the quaint and affluent environment of New London,
seemingly so distant from the clash of cultures and ideas—about grammar,
back-to-basics, great works, among them--that was making a traditional approach
to literacy appear ever more out of step. Yet after a week, the group was able
to craft a document that has profoundly influenced literacy studies ever since.
Roots of A Pedagogy of Multiliteracy
The
Pedagogy of Multiliteracies signaled a radical shift in the role of words for
many purposes, their relationship to other media, and their singular place at
the center of literacy. Since the dawn of alphabetic script, those who could
read and write were accustomed to status and access to social capital. Images
were not valued as conveyors of meaning. But as George recounts in “From Analysis to
Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing,” images began to encroach
upon words in the middle of the last century (2). In 1946, the teachers guide
to the new Dick and Jane beginning reader reminded instructors that children
live in a world awash in images—in magazines, advertisements, movies, and comic
books—and recommended that children be taught to read pictures, too. Television
challenged literacy further, spurring the NCTE to issue a report in 1961. Television
and the Teaching of English determined that television was not the equivalent of
literature but should be accepted as a literary text of sorts, and saw the task
of the English teacher to train critical judgment about it (George 11-12).
College
writing departments held images at arms length. Successive revisions of the
popular writing text, James McCrimmon’s Writing with a Purpose, included visual charts
and graphs as source information for writing exercises, and occasionally
included prints or paintings as prompts to inspire students to write with
compelling visual detail. By the 1970s, however, the visual began to make
inroads on the text itself, with the addition of colorful illustrations and
wider margins. Robert Connors historical analysis of these changes reveals that
the publisher did so grudgingly to appeal to the less capable student, and
clearly viewed it as a sort of “dumbing down.” (George 8-9) A philosophical
shift in the privileged role of words in the making of meaning came in 1987
with the publication of Ways of Reading, a composition reader by David
Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Their title was a nod to John Berger’s Ways
of Seeing,
a book that had radically shaken the art world by suggesting that the meaning
of images changed over time and with context (were culturally informed), and
which broke down the barrier between high art (art history) and low
(advertising). Perhaps more significantly, Ways of Seeing contained several
“essays” that consisted only of images and that Berger believed raised
questions as well as any essay in words. In their own book, Bartholomae and
Petrosky made it clear they believed meaning was no longer restricted to words
alone, and that the visual was more than a linguistic prompt
(George 11-12).
Also
during the 1980s, the NCTE was puzzling over film. William Costanzo, who wrote
a report for the organization’s Committee on Film Study in 1981, at first saw
the medium in a familiar way, as a prompt for writing. But by1986 his views had
changed: “If I once regarded film study as a path to better writing, I now see
film and writing as equal partners traveling along the same road” (86).
Costanzo wrote that his shift had been informed by new research in semiotics,
neurophysiology, and cognitive psychology that had found strong connections
between visual forms of thought and written language. He added, “Writing
involves more visual thinking than we recognized in traditional composition
classes” (86). The cognitive barriers between the media were breaking
down.
At
the same time that scholars, teachers, and publishers were pondering the slow
encroachment of images, television, and film on the linguistic domain,
technology was doing the same in hyperspeed.. In 1981, the IBM PC went on sale,
and in 1982 Wordperfect hit the market, email debuted in 25 cities, and Time magazine named the
Computer its Man of the Year. Two years later, the Apple McIntosh appeared for
the first time, and so did the word “cyberspace.” The World Wide Web was born
in 1990 with the creation of the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTML) and in
1994 the first internet browser, Netscape, was released (Timeline of
Computing History,
1996). With these tools, the
ability to create words and share them was growing easier and available to a
broader public, with no educational gatekeeper. The demand for visual
representation and the ability to combine media were also growing. It was
against this intellectual and technological backdrop that those ten scholars
met in Rhode Island to ponder literacy.
A New
World Order
The
New London Group began their report with a mission statement about
education--“to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that
allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life” (1)--
and by recognizing the particularly important role of literacy pedagogy in
fulfilling that mission. The group’s second statement was a call to reinvent
it. Historically, they wrote, literacy pedagogy had been “a carefully
restricted project—restricted to formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and
rule-governed forms of language” (1). They proposed, instead, a pedagogy of
“multiliteracies,” reflecting two contemporary realities, first, the emergence
of “multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communications patterns that
more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries” (4) now
required for work and civic engagement, and second, the proliferation and
integration of many different modes of meaning-making, in which texts are
related to visual, audio, spatial, behavioral and other elements. Because of
both trends, one standard or set of skills could no longer be the substance of
literacy learning (4).
In
their view, literacy as flexible, fluid, and multimodal was not separate from
other spheres of life; it reflected the forces at play in other arenas, from
the most public to the most private. While nation-states had proliferated in
the contemporary world, the more salient conflicts over power and access to
wealth centered on narrower issues of identity and recognition, often around
regional or ethnic interests.
The language of civic discourse reflected these new differences (7-8).
In the workplace, traditional
command-and-control hierarchies based on race, gender, and education had
devolved into organizations with flattened management structures, collaborative
cultures, and informal peer to superior relationships. They demanded multiple
skills, creative investment, and the ability to adapt to constant change. But
as diffuse and often ill-defined as these work cultures may be, each still has
a mainstream language that workers need to understand and use, often requiring
code-switch between workplace discourse and that of the individual’s private
life (5-7) .
These
profound changes in civic and work life were matched by changes in the personal
sphere as well. Private lives were becoming more public and public discourse
more informal, what the NLG called the “conversationalization” of public
language.
Narrower issues of identity, while becoming more significant in political life,
were becoming determinant in private lives as well, as people more openly
identified along lines of gender, ethnicity, generation, and sexual
orientation. At the same time that these private differences were being pushed
into the public space, mass media culture was invading private spaces,
threatening to crowd out personal narratives with those of a global commodity
culture (8-9). The NLG saw all of these changes reflected in language: “As
lifeworlds become more divergent and their boundaries more blurred, the central
fact of language becomes the multiplicity of meanings and their continual
intersection” (10). Because the study and teaching of language was their
domain, they knew that traditional approaches would not longer work.
As
the NLG saw it, schools play a critical role in regulating access to social
discourses (structured set of conventions) and symbolic capital that determine
students’ life opportunities. Because of all of the trends summarized above,
however, they parted ways with one plank of the progressive philosophy of Dewey
and others that viewed schools as agents of assimilation, creating homogeneity
out of differences. Instead, they believed schools should recruit, rather than
erase or ignore the differences and subjectivities that students bring to the
classroom; they should provide access without requiring people to leave their
differences behind. Schools had to be in tune with a world of flattened
hierarchies, creative urgency, constant change, code-switching, porous
public/private boundaries, global and local diversity, and civic pluralism. The
classroom should be a microcosm of the transformed relationships and realities
outside its doors. In that space, students and teachers engage in designing
social futures.
A
Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
The
New London Group kept their eye squarely on the classroom, on what students
need to learn. Their central notion of pedagogy was one of design. They chose
the concept for its connection to two separate threads—to the structure of an
object (“the design of a car”) but moreso for its suggestion of a creative act,
one that ultimately could transform the person, or student, from passive
receiver to active maker. The NLG viewed any semiotic activity, including using
language to consume or read texts, as involving three elements: Available
Designs, the structured conventions, grammars, and objects of any semiotic
system (language, film, music, etc); Designing, the process of shaping meaning
out of available designs, including reading, seeing, listening, speaking, and
writing; and the Redesigned, the outcome of Designing, from simple transformed
understanding to the creation of unique products of human agency (11).
The
NLG believed a literacy curriculum could be built upon the framework of design,
but first it had to acknowledge the increasing importance of modes of meaning
other than linguistic ones. They elevated four others alongside it, “Visual
Meanings (images, page layouts, screen formats); Audio Meanings (music sound
effects); Gestural Meanings (body language, sensuality); and Spatial Meanings
(the meanings of environmental spaces, architectural spaces).” (28) An
additional mode, Multimodal, related all the others together. To understand the
messages of contemporary life, they believed--from magazines, to movies, to a
trip to the mall--it was no longer sufficient to read the linguistic messages
embedded in them. A full understanding required examining all their modes of
meanings and the connections among them.
The
New London Group’s pedagogy rested on four components: Situated Practice, Overt
Instruction, Critical Framing, and Transformed Practice. Situated Practice, the
most prominent, reflected the long history of progressive education, from Dewey
to Street and the notion of situated practice.
Mastery, they believed, requires “immersion in a community of learners engaged
in authentic versions of such practice….” (20) But because learners can vary
significantly from one to another, can pursue leads that are not useful,
because higher-order language may not develop from immersion alone, and because
situated practice may not lead to conscious control without guidance, more is
needed. In Overt Instruction, then, teachers guide a community of learners as
“masters” of practice, to help focus learning and provide specific tools.
Teachers can help, too, with Critical Framing, urging the student to stand back
and understand what they’ve learned in all its contexts, including historical
and social as well as those of the particular field of which it is a part.
Finally, in Transformed Practice, students demonstrate what they have learned
by designing, carrying out, and reflecting upon new practices. Transformed
Practice also provides opportunities for the student to assess his or her
learning and to be assessed.
The
New London Group’s notion of design went further than any single act, however.
They applied the same principles to create a new pedagogy. They meshed their
observations of the changes afoot in the world with their ideas about education
and schools and devised a new plan for teaching. In doing for, they knew, they
were encouraging a new social order, a design for the social future.
From Page
to Screen
Far
from pushing words into the shadows, digital, interactive, social, and other
new media have unleashed a tsunami of writing and composition. Kathleen Yancey
believes we have entered a new Age of Composition (“Writing in the 21st
Century” 5) and compares it to the way reading flourished in the 19th
century when the effects of the printing press finally took hold (“Made Not
Only in Words” 299). More people write now than ever before, including email
messages, Facebook posts, tweets, instant messages, blog posts, fan fiction,
and more. Photographs, emoticons, videos, and other graphic content often
accompany these messages. The site of all of this composition, however, has
shifted from the page to the screen, an inherently visual space (Kress, 65).
The choice of words, visuals, arrangement, and movements within and from a page
together embody ideas and assertions (Wysocki 1).
Learning
print literacy today does not precede other competencies; it develops along
with digital literacy and all of its multimodal elements. As Yancey writes, “We
have moved beyond a pyramid-like, sequential model of literacy development in
which print literacy comes first and digital literacy comes second and
networked literacy practices, if they come at all, come third and last” (NCTE
6). Print literacy as gatekeeper began to fade when educators realized that
children didn’t need to learn to spell perfectly before beginning to write.
Similarly, it is now accepted that complex thinking can develop alongside
beginning skills. Facility with a variety of modes of meaning can grow
simultaneously.
While
thinking and communicating multimodally is increasingly more common, most of
this composition occurs without instruction and beyond the classroom. Schools
are struggling to get their bearings. Twenty years after A Pedagogy of
Multiliteracies was
published, many teachers remain dedicated to the traditional practices of their
discipline and fear spending time incorporating multimodal forms of composition
would be a distraction. Takayoshi and Selfe, writing in Multimodal
Composition: Resources for Teachers, lament “the astonishing lack of change in
classroom assignments and student-authored writing”(2). Students in many
English composition classes are still involved almost solely on producing
essays that could have been written by their parents and grandparents, and that
are out of step with the documents in the digital environments through which
most of the meaning in our society now comes. Takayoshi and Selfe give several
reasons for teachers to shift their literacy pedagogy and to broaden their
understanding of composition and of texts: because multimodal texts are the
communications currency of our time, because creating them reflects the participatory
values of progressive education, and also because it can be more engaging for
student and teacher alike. They believe that composition teachers, without
abandoning their primary responsibility to teach the mastery of alphabetic
writing, can nevertheless help students create and interpret texts, even when
the nature of texts has changed. The goal has been the same in every age: “to
teach students effective, rhetorically based strategies for taking advantage of
all available means of communicating effectively and productively, to multiple
audiences, for different purposes, and using a range of genres” (9).
College
composition professor J. Elizabeth Clark agrees that “new technologies and the
teaching of writing have yet to merge” (“The Digital Imperative,” 1). Notions
of authorship, authority, audience, and the writing process are all being
redefined in the world at large. In her classroom, where technology is welcome,
she finds other challenges. Students who are digital natives and comfortable
with new media may still lack critical thinking skills, familiarity with
editing and revision, the skills to produce multimodal texts themselves, and
experience code-switching for different technologies and different audiences
(“New Worlds,” 32-35).
The gap between composition outside and inside
schools represents a risk for institutions that have traditionally been the
incubators and leaders of ideas and movements (Clark, “Digital Imperative” 28).
Students accustomed to informal, unbound, and multimodal ways of communicating
may increasingly lose patience with the pace of academic institutions and find
schools irrelevant (Lutkewitte 11).
On
paper, at least, things are changing. This past February, the NCTE updated
their Definition of 21st Century Literacies to reflect social and
technological change. The statement acknowledges that to be literate in a
global society demands multiple literacies and involves many abilities and
competencies. Proficiency with the tools of technology and the ability to
“create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts” are specifically
identified.
At
its annual meeting next March, the Council of Writing Program Administrators
will consider a revision of its Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition
that would eliminate Composing in Electronic Environments as a separate
outcome. The proposed revision blends technology and multimodality into each of
its other goals, and replaces “writing” with “composing” (Clark, “Digital
Yesterdays”).
The
Common Core Standards for primary and secondary education, to which forty-five
states have signed on, weaves technology into its standards for every year.
Overall, the standard requires that “Technology is being used in our classrooms
to collaborate, create content, and solve problems.” From kindergarten through
high school, students are provided opportunities to explore digital tools,
conduct research online, analyze content, and produce their own meaning for
various media (Cooper).
The
challenges remain. Even as schools, colleges, and universities adapt, the world
outside is changing even faster. Students arrive with technical skills and ways
of interacting with them that teachers do not know. Good teachers have always
looked for ways to learn from their students, but that will be a critical skill
in the years ahead. Constant learning and adaptation will be an imperative not
just for students and teachers, but for adults in every field. The New London
Group saw extraordinary social and technological forces emerging and sought to
create a vision to reflect them. But the challenge may be bigger than they
could have known. They wrote their report before the arrival of social media
like Facebook and Twitter, before the development of the interactive internet
known as Web 2.0, before smartphones, cloud computing, crowd sourcing,
Wikipedia, and more. Human culture is certainly in the middle of a
transformation like that from the age of scribes to the age of print, but the
change may be as sweeping as that from oral to print culture. Schools and the
compositions generated within them must transform too. Designing a social
future may be a bigger task than anyone has yet imagined.
Footnotes
Works Cited
Clark,
J. Elizabeth. “The Digital Imperative.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010), 28-35.
---.
“Digital Yesterdays, Digital Tomorrows.” The Mina Shaunghnessy Speaker Series.
New
York.
6 December 2013. Speech.
---.
“New Worlds of Errors and Expectations: Basic Writers and Digital Assumptions.”
Journal
of Basic
Writing
28.1 (2009): 32-49. Web.
Cope,
Bill and Mary Kalantzis. Introduction. Multiliteracies. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary
Kalantzis.
London and
New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.
Costanzo,
William. “Film as Composition.” College Composition and Communication 37.1
George,
Diana. “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of
Writing.”
College
Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002): 11-39. Web.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1512100
Kress,
Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London and New York: Routledge. 2003.
Lutkewitte,
Claire. “The First Digital Native Writing Instructors and the Future Multimodal
Composition Classroom.” Basic Writing e-Journal. 10.1/11.1 (2011-2012).
Web.
http://bwe.ccny.cuny.edu/LutkewitteDigitalNativeInstructor.html
The New London Group. “A
Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard
Educational
Review 66.1 (Spring 1996), 1-29, Web. 11 October 20123.
wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/A_Pedagogy_of_Multi
literacies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm#11
“The
NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies.” National Council of
Teachers of English.
15 Feb.
2008. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Timeline
of Computing History,
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/
Wysocki,
Anne Francis. “Impossibly Distinct: On Form/Content and Word/Image in Two
Pieces
of
Computer-Based Interactive Multimedia.” Computers and Composition 18 (2001): 137-
Yancey,
Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College
Composition
and Communication 56.2
(2004): 297-328.
---.
Writing in the 21st Century. Retrieved Dec. 13, 2013, from
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey final.pdf
