Multiliteracies and multimodal literacies are a comprehensive response to the mobile semiotics of contemporary society. Flows of people, images and ideas, have meant the impact is experienced globally as well as locally and contextually. Along with New Literacy Studies, multiliteracies framework has as its central focus a socially just and culturally inclusive curriculum. Further, informed by critical pedagogy and critical literacy, multiliteracies has, at its conceptual centre, a transformative pedagogy aimed at effective learning across social and cultural differences, and across different learning styles. To attend to the change in social futures, multiliteracies has, at its nexus, student knowledges, lived experiences and student centred resources.
Central to multiliteracies is the concept of Design. The New London Group indicates the numerous ways by which signification occurs. More recently, as Kalantzis and Cope (2005) describe it, “there is a nice ambiguity in the word ‘design’. Design can denote morphology or the sense of invisible inner structures or inherent relationships of cause and effect” (p. 41). Kalantzis and Cope (2005) use Design in a comprehensive manner to denote “agency” as the “stuff of the characteristically self-conscious pedagogical moves, teaching frameworks and organisational forms of education as we currently understand it” (p. 41). In brief, as Falk (2001) observes, for the New London Group, Design expresses “the active role of the literacy learner in constructing new meaning from existing resources” (p. 314). Because Design rejects isolated, abstract and decentralised learning, it demands “production of the new rather than replication of the old” (Kress, 2000, p. 141). In Design, the learner is actively creating and re-creating while having choices in learning that did not exist in traditional print-based models of literacy.
The modes or Design concepts are: linguistic, visual, audio, spatial and gestural; however, the New London Group do not perceive each of these literacies as singular and isolated from other literacies. For students who engage with the four knowledge processes there is deep understanding and proactive learning:
• Experiencing: through the known and the new, where the evidence data from the prior knowledge and life experience of the learner is combined with immersion in new knowledge and new experience in meaningful settings.
• Conceptualising: abstract concepts and theoretical synthesis by the process of naming and theorising. This enables the learner to define, apply concepts and comprehend the abstract generalised meanings in concepts and visual representations.
• Analysing: analysing, interpreting functions capably, through the comprehension of the role of knowledge and critically by analysing purpose and intentions.
• Applying: knowledge appropriately and creatively by understanding suitable situations to apply knowledge and extending it to create new knowledges.
IYER, Radha; LUKE, Carmen. Multimodal, Multiliteracies: Texts and Literacies for the 21st century. In: PULLEN, Darren L.; COLE, David R. Multiliteracies and Technology Enhanced Education. Social Practice and the Global Classroom. Hershey and New York: ICI Global, 2010, p. 22. (Adapted).
After reading this passage on multiliteracies and design, choose the alternative that best conceptualizes those two words.
