Bill Cope

A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures

THE NEW LONDON GROUP 1 In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overoiew of the connecxad tions between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call multiliteracies. The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linxad guistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how nexad gotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment. If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, one could say that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. Literacy pedagogy is expected to play a particularly important role in fulxad filling this mission. Pedagogy is a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation. Literacy pedagogy has traditionally meant teaching and learning

Multiliteracies : literacy learning and the design of social futures

Review(s) of: Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis. Macmillan Publishers Australia, Melbourne. 2000, 355 pages,

“Multiliteracies”: New Literacies, New Learning

44.95 ISBN 0 7329 5904 7

Assessing Multiliteracies and the New Basics

This paper examines the changing landscape of literacy teaching and learning, revisiting the case for a “pedagogy of multiliteracies” first put by the New London Group in 1996. It describes the dramatically changing social and technological contexts of communication and learning, develops a language with which to talk about representation and communication in educational contexts, and addresses the question of what constitutes appropriate literacy pedagogy for our times.

Designs for Learning

This paper addresses the skills and characteristics required of successful learners, workers and citizens in the knowledge economy. The authors trace the shifting commercial, technological and cultural conditions characteristic of this economy, and highlight the key qualities now required for individual success. Effective learners will increasingly need to be autonomous and self-directed, flexible, collaborative, of open sensibility, broadly knowledgeable, and able to work productively with linguistic and cultural diversity. While still prevalent, it is held that standardised testing and a back to basics approach to curriculum are unable to promote and measure effectively these skills and sensibilities. Instead, a broader and more creative approach to curriculum and assessment is recommended. A new basics is argued for at the level of curriculum, with correlative assessment techniques such as analysis of portfolios, performance, projects and group work.

The Teacher-as-Designer: Pedagogy in the New Media Age

This article explores the potentials of new pedagogical approaches, assisted by digital technologies, to transform todays learning environments and create learning for the future – learning environments which could be more relevant to a changing world, more effective in meeting community expectations and which manage educational resources more efficiently. Equally important, the challenge is to create learning environments which engage the sensibilities of learners who are increasingly immersed in digital and global lifestyles – from the entertainment sources they choose to the way they work and learn. The experimental work upon which this article is based is grounded in a philosophy of teaching and learning that values a variety of active ways of knowing. Teaching that harnesses diversity and leads to learner transformation involves a variety of knowledge processes that need to be made explicit and part of a teachers pedagogical repertoire. The tools described in the article provide a way for educators to reflect on their choices, document their learning programs, map curriculum, share effective practice and write up learning community goals. They also allow students to build, share, collaborate upon and publish portfolios of the work they have created digitally. The result will be greater transparency and accountability amongst those who share responsibility for education.

New learning: Elements of a science of education, second edition

This article outlines a learning intervention which the authors call Learning by Design. The goal of this intervention is classroom and curriculum transformation, and the professional learning of teachers. The experiment involves the practical application of the learning theory to everyday classroom practice. Its ideas are grounded in pedagogical principles originally articulated in the Multiliteracies project, an approach to teaching and learning that addresses literacy and learning in the context of new media and the globalizing knowledge economy. The need for a new approach to learning arises from a complex range of factors — among them, changes in society and the economy; the potential for new forms of communication made possible by emerging technologies; and rising expectations amongst learners that education will maximize their potential for personal fulfillment, civic participation and access to work. The authors first brought together the Learning by Design team of researchers and teachers in 2003 in order to reflect upon and create new and dynamic learning environments. A series of research and development activities were embarked upon in Australia and, more recently, in the United States, exploring the potentials of new pedagogical approaches, assisted by digital technologies, to transform todays learning environments and create learning for the future — learning environments which could be more relevant to a changing world, more effective in meeting community expectations and which manage educational resources more efficiently. One of the key challenges was to create learning environments which engaged the sensibilities of learners who are increasingly immersed in digital and global lifestyles — from the entertainment sources they choose to the way they work and learn. It was also about enabling teachers to explicitly track and be aware of the relationship between their pedagogical choices and their students learning outcomes.

Learning by Design: creating pedagogical frameworks for knowledge building in the twenty‐first century

Preface Part I. Introduction - Changing Education: 1. New learning 2. Life in schools Part II. Contexts - Changing Conditions for Learning: 3. Learning for work 4. Learning civics 5. Learning personalities Part III. Responses - Ways of Learning and Teaching: 6. The nature of learning 7. Knowledge and learning 8. Pedagogy and curriculum 9. Learning communities at work 10. Measuring learning.

Text-Made Text

In this paper we present a new theoretical framework for effective teaching and learning in the twenty‐first century. We focus on learning activities that exemplify pedagogy as knowing in action and consider the ways in which this enables a transformation of learning in schools. We provide examples of the ways in which this can be designed and implemented. The incorporation of new technologies to assist in this process is central. The use of ICT for documenting and publishing teacher designs for learning form the basis of our work with teachers. The learning activities that they created for their students incorporated the use of ICT in dynamic ways since these are the resources that form the basis of their actions and problem solving in their daily lives.

The future of the academic journal

What is the nature of the change represented by digital communications technologies? How will the impact of the digital compare with the massive changes spawned in its time by print and books? These are the two key questions addressed in this article. The authors answer the first of these questions by comparing the emergence of the printed book with the emergence of the digital communications technologies. The next section of this article, ‘Transformations in Ways of Meaning: the case of print’, discusses the technological nature and textual consequences of the printing press. The following section, ‘Transformations in Ways of Meaning: designing text digitally’, does the same for digital connectivity. Several themes emerge.