Blog post #4

Blog Post #4
I should have known by the title, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, that this piece would be hard. I barely know what pedagogy means; I know it has something to do with teaching practices. And what the heck are multiliteracies? Yikes.
So yeah, this was beyond hard reading.
I am hesitant to steal from the first paragraph, but it really does give a nice little synopsis of what the entire article is about:
[T]he New London group presents a theoretical overview of the connections 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 linguistic 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 negotiating the multiple lingustic [sic] 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. (60)
So I ripped off an entire paragraph. Bad girl! I came away from reading this article more confused than ever about literacy. This article is rich with language that is aimed at those who are literate in this field. It is not for the everyday man. So I expect that I will be pulling lots of quotes from this article, because I am not sure how to define some of this stuff, yet alone, paraphrase it. I think the best way to wrap my head around a few of the ideas presented is to take a systematic approach to this paper.
The New London Group addresses “the mission of education … is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life” (60). I think this is a fine definition. What gets tricky though, is the HOW do we accomplish this. This article intends to “broaden” the scope of literacy to include cultural diversity and account for globalization. In essence, “How do we ensure that differences of culture, language, and gender are not barriers to educational success?” (61). I think that is the essential question that they ask. Getting to an answer, if there is one, appears murky. That’s how I felt trying to absorb this reading: murky. These theories are deliciously out of my reach.
The languages 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)
When the article focused on our private lives, my ears perked up. The group points out that our “subcultural differences” are becoming more “significant” and that those people “who yearn for ‘standards,’ such differences appear as evidence of distressing fragmentation of the social fabric” (70). This sounds to me like the end of the status quo. It also feels generational. The older generation is distressed at this cultural shift as the younger generation is exposed and has more access to “less regulated, multi-channel media systems” which “promotes … an increasing range of accessible subcultural options … [t]his spells the definitive end of ‘the public’ — that homogeneous imagined community of modern democratic nation states” (70). That word, homogeneous, used in conjunction with the “public” scares me. I don’t want my life to be part of a homogenous public. I shiver at the idea that this is an imagined (probably desired) intention.
The group then points out that for as often as deregulation occurs, there is an opposite also occurring, “the increasing invasion of private spaces by mass media culture, global commodity culture, and communications and information networks” (70).
This is basically where I fall off the learning curve. There is another fifteen pages or so in this article, and what little I was able to understand ended around page seventy. We’ve been asked to write a bit about the social view of literacy learning. I understand that this course is supposed to be cumulative. Right now though, I am pretty confused. After reading, and trying to evaluate this difficult piece, my brain is not in a good place to try and define, or even make some assumptions about literacy learning. I’ll get to this concept some other time, in some other post.