Reflective Blog #1 from Multiliteracies Course Feb 1, 2021

Reflective Blog #1 from Multiliteracies Course Feb 1, 2021 

First, I will explain multiliteracies as I’ve come to understand it in the past couple weeks. It appears to a multimodal way to teach creating and reading, otherwise called meaning making. We want our students to be conversant with various forms of communication, including graphic text, video, audio, body language, spatial, as well as lexical, or language-based communication (The New London Group (NLG), 1996, p. 65)—all this in addition to multiple languages and cultures. For our students to be conversant, we, too, need to be, and thus we need a metalanguage—the description of which I will pick up later—for analyzing and describing the various modes of communication.

The goals of such a pedagogy are to foster good community and feelings of equality, removing sources of hierarchies, including between teachers and students (p. 73), in part to prepare students for the changing nature of postFordist business structures (p. 66) as well as o prepare them to function in an increasingly multicultural, multilingual, and technology-centered world.  At the same time, the New London Group, the group who created the Manifesto to promote this new pedagogy, recognize that the world’s increasingly technology-based society has its pitfalls that can lead to people being marginalized or to exacerbating their pre-existing marginalization, so the group’s hope is that such a pedagogy will help open minds and remove such barriers to progression and in fact “promote flexibility, creativity, innovation and initiative” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 6). They call the mechanism for the change “Design,” which is, in part, intended to overhaul elitist practices that have contributed to scholars (and others) seeing their efficacy as tied to their skill in criticizing (NLG, 1996, p. 65). Designers, instead, promote flexibility, creativity, etc. in meaning making.  

The metalanguage seems to still be in the process of formation, (or we as students/I as a student in this class are/am still in the process of learning it) but in Kress’s webinars he correlates it to separate tool bags, so perhaps it’s easier to say metalanguages than a metalanguage. They appear to use terms from graphic design as well as from linguistics to describe the anatomical parts of a mixed-media or multi-modal communication. I’m still puzzled why they don’t use more terms from the field of rhetorical studies since therein is an apt metalanguage for many of the intentions of the multiliteracies movement, although it was promising to see Alvarez Valencia (2016) analyze part of the discussion of rhetoric in a college composition textbook.

Speaking of textbooks, one point I found that we can immediately apply is the use of textbooks to promote multicultural perspectives either by supplementing them or incorporating our own materials to overshadow existing textbooks that don’t foster such mindsets. On the other hand, we can also use textbooks’ multi-modal nature to help students understand different positive cultural notions as well as just to learn the language as they use visual, auditory, and video-based cues to enhance their comprehension of the language and, in turn, their abilities to produce their own meanings. Along these lines, we can also promote our students’ meaning making by requiring multi-modal assignments that could have the additional (potential) benefit of helping to relieve some of the stresses associated with their personal senses of identity being too tightly connected in their minds to the way they communicate in their native language.

Álvarez Valencia, J. A. (2016). Meaning making and communication in the multimodal age: Ideas for language teachers. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 18(1), 98-115.

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164-195.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 60-92.