001. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Getting started with the article ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’ by The New London Group was a breeze but getting through the whole article was totally not. It seemed like a love-hate relationship. Albeit the interesting and relevant content, it was hard to understand and digest. And now, I shall attempt to make some sense out of what has been boggling my mind for the past few days.

What is the point that this article attempts to make?
In the past (like the olden days of China….), children were sent to school with the hope that they would become literate, this meaning being able to read and write. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, where one is surrounded by many stimuli that tease and engage our senses and mind, the meaning of ‘being literate’ seems to have taken on a new form.

As mentioned by the author of the article, the three realms of our existence: our working lives, our public lives and our personal lives are radically changing and this has resulted in paradigm shifts in the way people think, speak, work and relate to one another. These paradigm shifts have birthed forth new languages of work, citizenship and lifeworlds. Productive diversity, civic pluralism and multilayered lifeworlds are the social futures that our students will be living in. Thus, as educators, it is our responsibility to ensure that our lessons, our curriculum, our pedagogy are constantly re-designed to grant our students access and empowerment to these social futures. This means that we have to equip them with the appropriate literacy skills that are needed for today’s world (eg. writing emails instead of letters). Only then can we say that our students are truly literate.

What aspects of 'multiplicity' does multiliteracies attempt to accommodate?
In my opinion, ‘mulitiplicity’ refers to the multiple types of discourses and text forms that are present in society today. These discourses and text forms do not exist or can be solely interpreted on the basis of linguistic design alone, but rather in a combination of more than one designs (visual, audio, spatial and gestural) or rather, multimodal. Thus, multiliteracy seek to ensure that one is able to make meaning and interpret a message that the sender is trying to deliver multimodal-ly. For example, an interpretation of the message of an advertisement does not rely solely on the text message, but also the colours used, gestures of the models, music etc.

What do the NLG mean by the ‘design’?
‘Design’ is an active, cyclical and generative process of meaning making. This process includes choosing from ‘Available Designs’ (eg. materials, knowledge, other resources), and recreating and recombining these to produce new designs or resources. This process of recreating and recombining is known as ‘Designing’ and the product of this process is known as the “Redesigned”. This process of ‘design’ is meaningful and purposeful, to suit the communication needs of the designer and audience.

How do you imagine multiliteracies pedagogy, as the NLG describe it, might operate in the contexts in which you have taught?
I taught English to the Primary 2 level during both practicum stints and the curriculum of the Primary 2 English syllabus in my school revolved largely around the use of narrative texts (namely, Big Books). One way of incorporating the multiliteracies pedagogy into my lesson could be the use of digital versions of the narrative text which is multimodal (audio, visual, gestural, linguistic). Alternatively, if the digital version of the book is not available, I can produce my own digital version by using images, animation and audio files.
Instead of asking the students to write their reflections in a journal, they could post their reflections online, and use images or audio files to accompany and complement the content of their writing.

Alright, enough of my ramblings 001 for now..

Ciao!!