TEACHING AND LEARNING IN NEW TIMES

Multiliteracies

What is the mission of education

Your thoughts….

What is the mission of education

According to the New London Group it is to “ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community and economic life.

The role of literacy pedagogy

The NLG believes that we should extend the idea and scope literacy pedagogy to include cultural and linguistic diversity.

Literacy pedagogy must take into account the rapidly growing numbers and types of texts and genres.

So that all learners may participate in our schools and society.

A definition of multiliteracies

The term attempts to capture the NLG’s two arguments

First, the “multiplicity of communications channels”

Second, the “increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity”

Also, it is an attempt to capture the reality of increasing local diversity and global connectedness (the world is flatter)

What does it mean to you?

Changing times

Changing working livesChanging public livesChanging private lives

Changing working lives

How has your working life changed?

Changing working lives

Dramatic global economic change (globalization)

The rise of the information economy (PostFordism or fast capitalism)

Greater emphasis on collaboration and multiskilled and highly skilled workers

But, unrestrained markets in which corporations make decisions based almost exclusively on profits

A view of literacy that equips workers with little emphasis on meaningful success for all

Changing public lives

How have you seen public life change?

Changing public lives

The diminishment of the welfare state and a decrease in the importance of public spaces that escalated after the end of the Cold War (a point that we will address in The World is Flat)

An emphasis on markets over community and civic space

Schooling and literacy teaching in the old order were focused on creating a unified language, a national language. In an age of diversity the NLG suggests civic pluralism take its place—a value for the many diverse cultures and languages.

Changing private lives

How have you seen your private life change?

Changing private lives

We are entering a time of greater emphasis on subcultural differences (identity and affiliation)

Gender, ethnicity, generation, sexual orientation to name a few

New technologies have created a space for multiple spaces for these subcultural discourses (cable tv, the internet, to name two)

But also an invasion of these spaces by mass media culture and global commodity culture

Private lives are becoming more public (social networking, blogs, electronic monitoring)

Making space for lifeworlds

The challenge, according to the NLG, is to make space so that different lifeworlds (spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made) can flourish

We are members of multiple lifeworldsSpace for all members of society (all

subcultures) to find their voices. Current and emerging technologies have the

capacity to accomplish this

Designing Social Futures

Changing Realities Designing Social Futures

Working lives Fast Capitalism/PostFordism

Productive diversity

Public Lives Decline of public pluralism

Civic pluralism

Private Lives Pluralism and invasion of space

Multilayered lifeworlds

What does this mean for schools?

What will count for success in the world of the near future?

How do we transform incrementally the achievable outcomes of schooling?

How do we supplement what schools already do?“We cannot remake the world through schooling,

but we can instantiate a vision through pedagogy that creates in microcosm a transformed set of relationships and possibilities for social futures, a vision that is lived in schools” (p. 11).

The “What” of Multiliteracies

Designs of meaning—learning and productivity are the results of the designs of complex systems of people, environments, technology, beliefs and texts. Available designs Designing The redesigned

Available Designs

Are the resources for designThe semiotic systems including language,

images, photos, sounds, etc.The available tools for design

Designing

The process of shaping new meaningThe transformation, reinterpretation, or

recontextualization of available designs into new and emerging designs

Reading, seeing, listening are examples of designing

The Redesigned

New meaning (not a reproduction), a new design that becomes a new available design