The New London Group (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66 (1). Retrieved from http://wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/

A_Pedagogy_of_Multiliteracies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm

In this article, the authors argue for new approaches to literacy in education in the face of changes within the working lives, public lives, and private lives of students. Unsurprisingly since Cope and Kalantzis are part of the New London Group, I saw a lot of connections to New Learning, particularly Ch. 3, 4, 5. I like that this article included how new literacies impact students’ private lives because I think that is a crucial aspect of why we need to support multiple literacies in the classroom: our students encounter them daily and may not have the tools to effectively engage. I thought they made a good point about how private lives were becoming increasing public. This has obviously become even more true in the time of Facebook when people often craft a version of their private life for public consumption.

The New London Group uses the notion of designs of meaning to think through how schools can address changing literacies. The first step is understanding Available Designs, or the conventions of different discourses. Then students can Design, the term the New London Group explain by stating, “The process of shaping emergent meaning involves representation and recontextualization.” Thus, students use Available Designs to create for their own purposes. This leads to Redesign, which is the product of the design process (I think?). They discuss how linguistic design and delivery impact the meaning-making process, and how other modes besides alphabetic text or language create meaning. To help students better understand this, they offer four components of pedagogy to approach teaching multiple literacies: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice. I like this four component approach because I feel like it is an approach toward digital literacy that can account for both the critical consumption of multimodal texts and the production of them.

DeVoss, D.N., Cushman, E. & Grabill, J.T. (2005). Infrastructure and composing: The when of

new-media writing. CCC, 57 (1), 14-44.

This article examines how infrastructure impacts creating multimodal projects. I really enjoyed this article because while I am definitely interested in bringing multimodal projects into the classroom, I haven’t in a real way in my classes because of concerns of infrastructure described in the article. When reading this, I was reminded of Latour’s point that we aren’t aware of all the components of things until they stop working or break down. For instance, an instructor might use a projector everyday in class and just see a projector, but when it won’t work one day, it becomes a bulb, a fan, a switch, etc, any of which could be causing the breakdown. In the article, DeVoss, Cushman and Grabill demonstrate how their understanding of the infrastructure and systems that go into multimodal projects grew from the problems that were encountered. I think the best take away from the article is that the students themselves gained knowledge from the struggles they had with the infrastructure limitations. This reminded me of a comment Amy made a few weeks ago about her creative solution when Popplet wouldn’t cooperate with the iPads for her lesson, which led to a discussion of the use of technology for learning. I think this is such an important point, for me especially, because it reminds me that everything does not have to go perfectly for learning to occur. I think one of the reasons I have shied away from multimodal projects was fear because I wasn’t familiar with all the components of the infrastructure and I didn’t know what I would do if students ran into trouble. Yet, as this article articulates learning can actually happen BECAUSE of these struggles, not just inspite of them.

Bishop-Clark, C. & Nelson, C.E. (2012). Engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus.