Fostering multiliteracies pedagogy through preservice teacher education

Teacher education for literacy teaching is often fairly narrow in focus. New approaches are needed that are sociocultural in orientation and take due account of the diversity of language forms, both traditional and contemporary, formal and informal, literary and non‐literary. We believe this need can be met by largely adopting a ‘multiliteracies’ approach as articulated by the New London Group. This research examined the ideas and practices of 10 literacy faculty in a large school of education and 22 first year literacy teachers from the same institution. It found that despite some important advances in a multiliteracies direction, many shortcomings remained. Part of the difficulty was lack of clarity about the nature and purpose of multiliteracies pedagogy. This paper has two main purposes: first, to attempt to clarify the nature and importance of a multiliteracies approach; and second, to report on the successes achieved and challenges encountered in moving in this direction in one school of education.     

Looking at the Next 20 Years of Multiliteracies: A Discussion with Allan Luke

In this discussion with literacies researcher Allan Luke, the New London Group Member reflects on the role of multiliteracies in shaping literacies research and the continuing changes to technology, capitalism, and learning. Focused on looking toward future advances in literacies research, Luke reflects on the role of multiliteracies in contemporary educational policy and how this work is shaping literacy scholarship and practice today. Luke looks pragmatically at the current political landscape and emphasizes how colonial practices of technology over the past twenty years bend literacies research away from the initial optimism expressed by the New London Group. At the same time, Luke grounds contemporary literacies interpretations of technology and learning in foundational critical theorist like Freire, Illich, and Dewey. By focusing on how technology has changed schooling, power, and literacies, Luke considers what challenges loom for the theory and practice of powerful, equitable literacies in the next two decades.     

Multiplicities in Motion: A Turn to Transliteracies

ABSTRACT

In an effort to draw attention to the mobile dimensions of meaning making, this article proposes a pedagogy of transliteracies, supporting educators and learners in critically reflecting on how people, media, and things are connected across space and time. Expanding on the New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies vision of communicative and ideological multiplicities, we articulate the importance of moving from multi- to trans- to highlight the mobile and emergent aspects of meaning making. We work through a classroom example to consider the contours of literacies and learning practices for making meaning on the move. We argue that in a mobile and digitally networked world, a pedagogy of transliteracies draws much needed attention to people and things connecting, relating, and intersecting, and also to how these connections, relations, and intersections occur in unequal ways that support some learners and disenfranchise others.     

From Designing to Organizing New Social Futures: Multiliteracies Pedagogies for Today

Abstract

More than 20 years ago, literacy pedagogies informed by the emerging networked world defined by local diversity and global connectedness, new digital media and fast capitalism. Modern people now fully inhabit the world they described, but the contours of that world’s racial dynamics and growing inequality call for a refinement of pedagogies that embrace a more activist metaphor than that of design. Our pedagogies of multiliteracies must now embrace the ‘organizing of social futures’ in ways that apprentice young people to repertoires of collective action, in which literacy becomes more fully a means of supporting community efforts to promote and bring about more just futures.     

Scientific strengths and reported effectiveness: a systematic review of multiliteracies studies

This systematic review is built on the seminal work by the New London Group in 1996. Few endeavours have synthesized findings of empirical studies pertaining to the effects and challenges of multiliteracies practices in various schooling and geographical contexts. Through a five-point Likert scale and a deductive and inductive thematic analysis, we conducted a systematic review of 66 multiliteracies articles from the ProQuest® database. These studies were empirical, qualitative/mixed-method, and ranged from 2006 to 2015. Findings show a burgeoning number of multiliteracies studies occurring in 15 countries, with Canada being the most prominently involved. Our evaluation of the reviewed studies was generally favourable with strengths identified in researchers’ articulation of pertinent theoretical frameworks and connections to existent literature. Our findings refer to insufficient information of data collection and data analysis in a certain number of papers. We also elaborate on major affordances, challenges, and oversights of the multiliteracies practices as reported by the reviewed studies and discuss implications for future multiliteracies research, policies on literacy education, and teacher education in diverse contexts.     

Changing Literacies and Civic Pathways: Multiliteracies in Inquiry-Driven Classrooms

Reflecting on how “the very nature of language learning has changed”(New London Group [NLG], 1996, p. 64), this article describes an inquiry-driven teaching approach to middle school English. Looking at student outcomes utilizing Google’s 20% approach, this study explored how mentorship, digital tools, and student interests provide “opportunities [for students] to find their own voices” (NLG, 1996, p. 71). In particular, this article analyzes student inquiry based on the 4 pedagogical foundations of multiliteracies: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. By focusing on the voices and experiences of students, this framework highlights what multiliteracies can look like within classrooms. Ultimately, this study of literacies within inquiry-driven classrooms responds to the call of multiliteracies research from 20 years ago that, “Students need to develop the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (New London Group, 1996, p. 67).     

培养多元读写能力的多模态教学模式研究

基于新伦敦小组提出的多元读写教学法,阐述了多元读写能力的内涵,并着力构建了培养学生多元读写能力的EPICC教学模式,认为多模态教学环境、实践（模拟实践和课外实践）、明确指导、批评性意识、多元文化是提高多元读写能力的重要因素。     

‘Invisible’ teachers of literacy: collusion between siblings and teachers in creating classroom cultures

The promise to raise literacy standards significantly at age 11 in economically disadvantaged areas has been an important part of the present British Government's educational policy. Integral to this promise has been the introduction of official home/school ‘contracts’ or ‘agreements’, which oblige parents to engage in specific literacy activities with their children. However, evidence from a longitudinal study of family literacy practices in East London suggests that family and community members other than parents might play a crucial role in initiating young children into literacy. Siblings particularly have been found to be efficient ‘teachers’ of school literacy practices. In this paper, I investigate particularly ways in which an unspoken collusion takes place between teacher and older sibling revealed during ‘play school’ sessions in Bangladeshi British households in East London.     

“DARING TO SAY”: STANLEY CAVELL AND DESIGNS ON LITERACY

In this essay Amanda Fulford examines the subject of inter‐cultural understanding from two perspectives: first, through considering Naoko Saito's exploration of translation and inter‐/intra‐cultural understanding, and second, through a discussion of work from the field of literacy studies, in particular the New London Group's “pedagogy of multiliteracies.” In her consideration of the different approaches taken to the challenge of multicultural and globalized societies, and the experiences of encounters with language, Fulford pursues four principal themes: learning from difference, active design of meaning, a relation with language, and transformation of the individual. She shows how Saito's use of American philosophy, in particular Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Stanley Cavell's readings of Thoreau, can play a crucial role in any reconsideration of teaching and learning in adult literacy education. Fulford further demonstrates how Thoreau's notion of the “father tongue” is central to the idea of learning from difference and to our use of language. She concludes by proposing that literacy education and research within the field of literacy studies could benefit from the kind of philosophical conversation, across the borders of subject and epistemology, that an exposure to, and consideration of, the ideas of Thoreau and Cavell on what it means to read and write can offer.     

Making as worlding: young children composing change through speculative design

A pedagogical perspective for rendering ways of knowing, being and being known, making and the larger maker movement are shaping contemporary educational places, practices and discourses. Despite these advances, its intersection with early literacy and childhood education are nascent. Thinking with theories of multiliteracies and speculative design, this article puts forth a making as worlding analytic frame for literacy research and practice. In doing so, we examine how two young children operate as speculative designers working towards possible, not solely plausible or preferable futures. Drawing on data from a multi‐sited study exploring making in early childhood settings, this article charts how early years and primary students used the contemporary affordances of analogue and immersive technologies to ‘make' a difference. Findings suggest that making provided opportunities not only for re‐storying realities but speculative worldbuilding encouraging young people to participate and problematise present realities.     

Exploring practices of multiliteracies pedagogy through digital technologies: a narrative inquiry

Digital technologies have fast become integral within literacy learning and teaching across contexts as students engage with a variety of digital and multimodal texts. While teachers in New Zealand schools have a high degree of autonomy in the design and planning of literacy programs, little is currently known about how they understand and enact multiliteracies pedagogy (MLP). Using data gathered via interviews and classroom observations in an intermediate school in New Zealand, this article adopts a narrative inquiry approach to explore one teacher's approaches to using digital technologies and texts within literacy instruction. We explore in particular the ways in which MLP may be enacted implicitly rather than explicitly, within the complex matrix of teachers' personal beliefs and learning experiences, the perceived learning needs of students, and the school curriculum. We conclude with a call for the conscious and purposeful teaching of MLP, focusing on synaesthesia and the semiotic functions of texts.     

Access to multiliteracies: a critical ethnography

This paper reports the key findings of a critical ethnography, which documented the enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an Australian elementary school classroom. The multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group is a response to the emergence of multimodal literacies in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Giddens’ structuration theory was applied to the analysis of systems relations. The key finding was that students, who were culturally and linguistically diverse, had differential access to multiliteracies. Existing degrees of access were reproduced among the student cohort, based on the learners’ relation to the dominant culture. Specifically, students from Anglo-Australian, middle-class backgrounds had greater access to transformed designing than those who were culturally or socio-economically marginalized. These experiences were influenced by the agency of individuals who were both enabled and constrained by structures of power within the school and the wider educational and social systems.     

Transformative and emancipatory literacy to empower

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on sociological and critical educational frames, particularly Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, in order to contest the dominant model of literacy education that is driven by the premise of a ‘knowledge economy’. Instead it foregrounds the political, social, and economic factors that marginalise learners. Data from two projects: an ethnographic study in a Further Education (FE) College in England and a study of community-based literacy programmes in Scotland, are probed to show how literacy classes can offer spaces to challenge symbolic violence and facilitate learners to reclaim identities of success. These changes are illustrated from the learners’ views of the contrasts between their experiences of school education and literacy programmes that use transformative and emancipatory approaches. Our research demonstrates how critical education can open up spaces for a more equitable approach based on the co-production of knowledge. It is argued that making changes to policy and practice could inform and shape the literacy curriculum and its pedagogy if adult literacy can disentangle itself from instrumental approaches driven by neoliberal fusion and instead create critical space for contextualised and emancipatory learning.     

Slash Writers and Guinea Pigs as Models for a Scientific Multiliteracy

This paper explores alternative approaches to the conception of scientific literacy, drawing on cultural studies and emerging practices in language arts as its framework. The paper reviews historic tensions in the understanding of scientific literacy and then draws on the multiliteracies movement in language arts to suggest a scientific multiliteracy. This is explored through analyzing the writing practices of groups other than scientists who for a variety of reasons must engage science. Specifically the paper examines zine writers who are ‘professional’ human research subjects, i.e. derive a part of their annual income by signing up for psychological and medical experiments, and science fiction fans, who produce their own texts in response to the narratives they love. The paper argues that these literacy practices add to traditional notions of scientific literacy possibilities of history, fiction, critique, as well as more traditional empiricism embraced by national standards. The paper concludes by considering the ambivalence towards science in both of these popular scientific literacy communities’ writings, arguing that what multiliteracies offers is a possibility of a more nuanced, more appropriately ambivalent, and more politically and ethically engaged subject of science than offered by the current version of literacy dominating science educational discourse.     

The multi‐modal redesign of school texts

Multiliteracies‐related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi‐modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese‐American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip‐hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi‐modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.     

From Digital Consumption to Digital Invention: Toward a New Critical Theory and Practice of Multiliteracies

The teaching of media and digital literacies has gained increased attention in the 20 years following the New London Group’s landmark publication. From approaches urging the study of popular culture to calls for youth led social media revolution, there is no shortage of approaches. Yet scant attention is offered toward articulating a new and comprehensive theory of pedagogy and production that acknowledges the changing tools and technologies at young people’s disposal, conceptualizes young people as media producers, and applies these developments to today’s complex classroom context. We aim to articulate a new critical theory of multiliteracies that encompasses 4 types of digital engagement: (a) critical digital consumption, (b) critical digital production, (c) critical distribution, and (d) critical digital invention. We make the argument that a new critical theory of multiliteracies needs to account for each of these types of digital engagement but that, ultimately, we must move beyond theorizing our youth as passive consumers or even critical users of digital technologies toward the project of facilitating youth communities of digital innovation.     

Using PIAAC data to learn more about the literacy practices of adults

ABSTRACT

The present article connects a secondary analysis of quantitative data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) with the theoretical approach of ‘literacy practices’ and related research results from the so-called New Literacy Studies (NLS) tradition, which follows a cultural practices paradigm.

According to the literacy as social practice approach, the analysis of adults’ literacy and numeracy practices could provide relevant policy information about how to address target groups in adult literacy and basic education. Thus, a Latent Class Analysis was carried out with the German PIAAC dataset in order to differentiate the adult population by their uses of literacy, numeracy and ICT.

As a result of this procedure, three subgroups of adults can be distinguished by the frequency in which they use selected skill-related activities. Surprisingly, an adult’s individual literacy level does not clearly predict group membership. A further interesting result is that participants in one of the groups seem to compensate for the few chances they have to use their skills at work by using them more often in their everyday life. Both results contribute to the need to draw a more differentiated picture of adults with lower literacy skills.     

A cautionary tale: digital resources in literacy classrooms

ABSTRACT

Supportive digital resources are key to supporting educators’ pedagogic practices in teaching children to be literate. But locating suitable resources can be confusing, with as claims about products being educational, aligned with curriculum outcomes, and even as ‘silver bullets’. In Australia, a lack of specificity in national and state curriculum guidelines about resource selection creates inconsistencies within and across schools. We investigate how teacher-selected digital resources are used in early childhood classrooms to support literacy learning. Drawing on three independent Australian classroom-based studies, we share three examples of children engaging with digital resources. Together, they show that not all digital resources promote active and engaged literacy learning in meaningful and socially interactive contexts. We propose principles for selecting digital resources to promote playful, scaffolded, and exploratory literacy learning.     

Computers and the Teaching of Writing: implications for teacher development

ABSTRACT

The relationship between the computer and the teaching of writing is complex; it varies over time, is embedded in the classroom social context, and depends on the teacher's instructional goals. In this article, several dimensions of this relationship are explored to provide illustrations of its complexity. The conclusion is that the computer literacy workshops or courses typically found in pre‐service or in‐service teacher educational programmes are inadequate to prepare teachers for the teaching of writing with computers. New kinds of courses need to be developed that examine how computers affect classroom culture and the writing process.