"A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" - The New London Group

Generally, the point which “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”, written by The New London Group, tries to make is to get teachers to ensure that every student has the opportunity to be exposed to knowledge via a repertoire of avenues. The article points out the ever-changing elements in people’s lives which call for the need for teachers to pay attention to, and also to think of ways to go along with these changes so that students are not, in a way, short-changed. The highlight is pretty much on the advancement of technology. At the same time, the article also gives an adequate depth of information on what teachers can do in schools to ensure maximum exposures to students in terms of conveying knowledge to them through the use of new technologies.

In terms of multiplicity, we see that everyone possesses multiple identities. This is not only mentioned in our reading here, but also in Beverly D. Tatum’s in ‘Multi-cultural Studies’ which we did in last semester. With multiple identities, the New London Group article states that “there are multiple discourses of identity and multiple discourses of recognition to be negotiated” (p.17).

To give a simple illustration, a child may be car maniac who enjoys reading car magazines when at home, and s/he may also share a deep interest in American Pop music with a bunch of good friends. With that, we see that the discourse between the car community and that of American Pop music is different. Hence, a teacher should try to tap these different discourses and forms of media, and use them to deliver knowledge which the teacher intends to convey. The teacher can actually use articles from car magazines to teach English, such as the grammar, the vocabulary, or even the sentence structure aspect. The same thing can be done by using song lyrics. On top of teaching the aforesaid aspects of English, song lyrics can also be taught as poems, and poetic features like rhyming scheme, metaphors, and similes can be highlighted to students from those lyrics. As a result, the teacher is seen accommodating to the multiple identities of the students, which is very much delving in the students’ “comfort zone”.

When dealing with students who use lots of computer, the teacher can try using materials from the web, such as videos from Youtube, to teach the students something from there.

Moving on to the definition of “design”, to me, it simply refers to “knowledge”. The paper states that there’re many different modes of “designs”, which include those of Linguistic (metalanguage), Visual (images, page layouts, screen formats), Audio (music sound effects), Gestural (body language, sensuality), and Spatial (environmental & architectural spaces). These designs can even be combined to become multimodal.

When the article talks about Available Designs, Designing, and The Redesigned, I see them as the followings:

Available Designs pretty much refer to existing knowledge that is available out there for any individual. These knowledge are categorised into genres, in which when one enters a specific discourse community, one will see that there’s a fix set of elements which one has to abide by in the discourse community.

Designing seems to me like the process of knowledge-transforming, as the articles includes reading, seeing and listening as instances of Designing. When one engages in the aforesaid activities, one is actually adding knowledge into one’s existing pool of knowledge. In addition, one can also coincide 2 or more existing knowledge, and produce a new knowledge (also known as The Redesigned). So in this case, the idea of coinciding 2 or more knowledge is known as Designing, while the product that is churned out from Designing is known as The Redesigned.

When it comes to adopting some of the things mentioned in the article in my own lessons, I would say Situated Practice is really crucial. This is to “immerse [students] in a community of learners engaged in authentic versions of [practices of different discourse communities]” (p.31). I will do that by exposing the students to a variation of texts meant for different literacies – TV, radio, the web, printed texts, and etcetera. This is to socialise the students into the various literacies available to them. And when students are considered fluent in the literacies, they can actually start questioning and analysing these literacies and probably even modify them to make them better. This will allow the students to engage in Available Designs, Designing, and eventually producing the Redesigned.
To do the aforementioned, I will need to help my students “denaturalise and make strange again what they have learned and mastered” (p.34). This can be done by having questions posed to the students to think about things which they would normally take for granted.