"The logic of Multiliteracies is one which recognises that meaning making is an active, transformative process, and a pedagogy based on that recognition is more likely to open up viable lifecourses for a world of change and diversity."

Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (2009)

In my practice as a music lecturer and teacher I have always buttressed with the ways of coming to know that had been privileged in the particular university where I work and where I had studied. There are a number of meanings I have come up with all which are still transforming as I engage in the world as a learner. I had travelled after studying and worked as a musician in various countries and continents, I had taught across South Africa, I had to engage with new visual and audio technologies and modalities in my work. So in the course of just over a decade my world of learning had changed. I could not now come and teach students about teaching a music instrument while remaining on the campus grounds for the entire period of the course. Sitting through hours of oral, unidirectional conversations and working with only written texts that are unaware of the reality they will face when they enter a local private school with first world technologies or a school with broken windows and no functional toilets on its premises. So how would they learn in one of the most unequal societies in the world? I decided that they need to spend the duration of the methods course in a school where we can provide a social benefit in terms of expertise and skills to the school and where our students. So in searching for a way of theoretical framing not only the experiential aspects but also the analytical aspects as well as how these students might possibly come to apply these understandings to their own practices one day i discovered http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-8/learning-by-design-knowledge-processes webpage. So for the last two years this thinking around New Learning and only as of late around New Literacies has slowly informed and shaped my thinking eventually leading me to this course.

So what is Multiliteracies (ML) - on the New Learning website the theory is illustrated by way of the summative diagrams below.

ML was an idea or outcome formulated by the New London Group in 1994. It was based on their discussions around literacy theory and pedagogy as related to global social transformations associated with communications technology and the increased sense of diversity that such communication encapsulates (The New London Group, 1996).

ML is concerned with meaning-making and the representations of those meanings could conceptually be understood as designs. Design within the theory of ML refers both to structure and form as well as to the act or actions of designing or producing. Furthermore all representations are seen as dynamic and transformative.

The representations or meanings are multimodal as we experience them today a digital story (text, audio, visual, spatial) a podcast (audio, oral, spatial). The numerous possibilities and permutations are what creates exciting and creative possibilities for me. It can also stimulate or prompt learning in a multi-sensorial manner. Also, learners’ unique learning modalities can assist with different and new understanding and possibilities for meaning-making.

With regards the pedagogy of ML the above four aspects have been reframed as knowledge processes into an approach called Learning by Design. http://newlearningonline.com/learning-by-design/lbd-principles

What I discovered when searching information on ML, was that the multi-representations of meaning making texts - that pervade our world of language and communication - have both parallels and incommensurate aspects as expressed in the 2009 article on Multiliteracies by Cope an Kalantzis. For example, I looked at the images above and text and much of it I could understand because of my interest in the work on New Learning. But when I read the article looking back after more than a decade of work on Multiliteracies then I had a better grasp of some of the concepts. I am sure if I watch a video of classroom practices around the principles of ML that again my understanding and meaning making would again change and hopefully deepen or increase my critical awareness of what I might have missed.

Practical example: https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/seminar/article/view/2354

This is the first time I come across an academic journal that represents information in a multimodal sense. Using the hallowed textual traditions of academia and synthesising it with ‘new’ or not so new media of a visual and oral text. Furthermore the content of the text refers to new media / multimodality and multiliteracies and is interested in the definitional stances and how this links to media education in the Finnish basic curriculum.

RESOURCES:

ARTICLES:

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘Multiliteracies: New Literacies, New Learning’, Pedagogies: An International Journal, Vol.4, 2009, pp.164-195.

The New London Group, 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard educational review, 66(1), pp.60-93.

VIDEO:

A Grammar of Maltiliteracies:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/multimodal-literacies/lecture/0yyhN/10-5-a-grammar-of-multiliteracies

WEBSITES:

http://newlearningonline.com/home