Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the author’s twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language to work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment (60).
The authors state, “A pedagogy of multiliteracies…focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone… Multiliteracies also creates a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational recourses, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes” (64).
They assert, “as designers of meaning, we are designers of social futures….The language needed to make meaning are radically changing in three realms of our existence: our working lives, our public lives (citizenship), and our private lives (lifeworld)” (65). Boiled down, the authors argue that as we become more global, as employment moves toward collaboration, flatter hierarchies, and mentorship, as our lives become more public, we need to learn to value and utilize difference (ethnic, racial, sexual, etc.) in our professional, educational and personal lives as well as to live in multiple lifeworlds (with multiple and overlapping identities) while accepting others’ multiple lifeworlds. This change, then, changes language and (should change) literacy education (65-71). Specifically, for education, “[E] very classroom will invariably reconfigure the relationship of local and global difference that are now so critical. To be relevant, learning processes need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase, the different subjectivities – interests, intentions, commitments, and purposes – students bring to learning. Curriculum now needs to mesh with different subjectivities, and with their attendant languages, discourses, and registers, and use these as a resource for learning” (72).
The authors use the language of designing to talk about literacy:
- Available Designs: Recourses for meaning
- Designing: The work performed on/with Available Designs in the semiotic process [includes reading, seeing and listening]
- The Resigned: The resources that are reproduced and transformed through Designing (77 direct quotes). Designing always leads to Resigning because all design reorders and reconfigures pervious Available Designs. Even reading and listening are Resigning because the individual brings his/her own past experience to the reading and listening.
The also describe four components of pedagogy. They state, though, that these components “does not constitute a linear hierarchy, nor do they represent stages. Rather, they are components that are related in complex ways. Elements of each may occur simultaneously, while at different times one or the other will predominate, and all of them are repeatedly revisited at different levels” (85).
- Situated Practice: “Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses, including those from the students’ lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workspaces and public spaces” (88)
- Overt Instruction: “Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding In the case of multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning” (88)
- Critical Framing: “Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular Designs of meaning. This involves the students’ standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context” (88)
- Transformed Practice: “Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites” (88).
Key Words
- Multiliteracies: “the multiplicity of communications channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity” (63)
- Lifeworld: “spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made” (70)
- Orders of discourse: “the structured set [or a particular organization] of conventions associated with semiotic activity (including use of language) in a given social space” (74)
- Discourse (little d): “a configuration of knowledge and its habitual forms of expression, which represents a particular set of interests” (75)
- Style: “the configuration of all the semiotic features in a text in which, for example, language may relate to layout and visual images” (75)
- Genre: “forms of text or textual organization that arise out of particular social configuration of the particular relationships of the participants in an interactions. They reflect the purpose of the participants in a specific interaction” (75)
- Symbolic capital: “symbolic meanings that have currency in access to employment, political power, and cultural recognition” (71-2)
- Metalanguage: “a language for talking about language, images, texts, and meaning-making interactions” (77)
- Grammar: “a range of choices one makes in designing communication for specific ends” (79)
- Hybridity: “the mechanisms of creativity and of culture-as-process particularly salient in contemporary society. People create and innovate by hybridity – that is, articulating in new ways – established practices and conventions within and between different modes of meaning” (82).
- Intertextuality: “the potentially complex ways in which meanings…are constituted through relationships to other texts (real or imaginary), text types (discourse or genres). Narratives, and other modes of meaning” (82)
*Note: The authors use design, functional grammars, modes of meaning synonymously.