Reading Summaries (or as I like to say, I am starting to get organized)

Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures - The New London Group

"Introduction: Multiliteracies: the beginnings of an idea"

Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

In introducing how the New London Group came to be and what their goal was, Cope and Kalantzis trace meaning making is changing as ideologies and cultures change and how educators can change pedagogical approaches to encompass these shifts. Multiliteracies as a term was chosen because it, "engages with the multiplicity of communications hannels and media," and because of the "increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity (5)." In other words, technology is changing so quickly, altering every facet of our lives, that we need to consider a range of literacies that work together to create meaning. The New London Group ultimately set out to create a theory and pedagogy that focuses on the (supposed) flexibility of multiliteracies and how they work in a meaning-making process.

"A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures"

The New London Group

This chapter lays out TNL's pedagogical approach that furthers multiliteracies as a way to account for a larger cultural picture and how it closely relates to how these literacies can account for communication technologies. They break down how multiliteracies affect working, public and personal lives and cultures. They lay out a framework of design - Available designs (various elements, such as language, discourses, and semiotics that are available), designing (where available designs are transformed depending on cultural and social conditions that change the meaning making process) and the redsigned (what is produced through the design process). This process allows all multiliteracies to function so that meaning is made on different levels.

They go on to layout different modes of meaning (audio, linguisitc, spatial, gestural, visual) and how they work together to create meaning. Two important terms for TNL are hybridity ("highlights mechanisms of creativity and of culture-as-process as particularly salient in contemporary culture (29)" and intertextuality (meanings made through relationships to other texts, narratives or modes of meaning (30)).

Finally, they lay out four linear, components of pedagogy that account for the varying modes of meaning.

Situated Practice - considers the varying needs and identities of learners.

OVert Instruction - learning activites that focus the learners into gaining information, as well as drawing on what they already know.

Critical Framing - helps learners master what they are receiving from situated practice and overt learning and "gain the necessary personal and theoretical distance fromtwhat they ahve learned; constructively critique it; account for it's cultural location; creatively extend and apply it' and eventually innovate on their own, within old communities and in new ones." (essentially, be more critical)

Transformed Practice - where assessment is done from what the learners have learned and how they can apply to other meaning making processes.

"Designs for Social Futures"

Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

Cope and Kalantzis focus on design, as a structure or function and as agency. Designing encompasses different modes of meaning and how it allows for transformation and change and cultures and everyday lived experiences (they use the term, "lifeworld"). They break down dimensions of meaning by looking at participants and modes of meaning, and well as situational examples. This leads to discussion of multimedia and how changes our lifeworlds in terms of access and power, but can also be isolating, which alters meaning making.

If anyone out there is reading this and thinks I have missed the mark or full of sh*t, please let me know.

Cope and Kalantzis use this chapter to