welcome to this series of videos we are going to revisit some of the theoretical frameworks that Bill cope and I have developed with others over many decades we're going to look at the concept of multi literacies also the concept of learning by design because both of these are relevant to education in the digital age and for making meaning just to establish the context the multi literacies project which was initiated in 1994 which is about twenty four years ago now was an endeavor of bringing people in the field who were concerned about literacy and meaning making
bring them together to try and reflect on the fact that despite all the work that we were doing despite all our CVS and all our research the gap between those who were performing informal educational settings and those who weren't performing was getting bigger so we had some resources from our Australian projects and we brought a group of people together at a place called New London in New Hampshire in the United States to talk about what makes a difference and how did we have to understand the learner of the future and the learning that was appropriate
we ended up publishing an article in the Harvard Review which became a manifesto for the multi literacies project but essentially what it was about were the following the first that learning or learning needs to be about design and meaning making is also a matter of design so it's not enough to be learning grammars or routines it's considering the way in which X learning experiences are designed in order to have particular effects the second point is that that kind of activity always involves a social purpose it's not just about filling in time it's not just about
getting through the curriculum it's about transforming others transforming people as learners transforming them as worker and transforming them as citizens that always goes together in the context of any learning experience whether we're explicit about it or whether it's implied in the designs that we put together we we have discovered over the many years in which we've worked with collaborators and have done research that there are three things that we believe make a difference in transforming learners and these are the following first is the context what we call diversity the context that people bring with them
into the learning environment their backgrounds their sense of identity their socio-economic background a whole range of factors makes an important different difference and every educator needs to address that diversity there is no curriculum no pedagogy that is a one size fits all so diversity its recognition and harnessing for productive purposes is one of the factors that makes a difference in transforming learners the second one we believe and increasingly is the case is that learners make meaning across disciplines in different modes and in different languages and in different dialects so understanding multi modality multi literacies it
has become increasingly more important the way in which meaning is made across different modes and how we harness the modes that new technology affords us and thirdly and equally importantly perhaps even more so is the word pedagogy and and that is about the purposeful choices any educator makes in any subject area they have these choices have to be particular to the subject they have to be particular to the goals they have to be particular to the individual so they have to be particular to the group it's not just about instructional sequences that fill in time
or cover an area it's understanding the way in which you engage with learners and that learners are transform along the way so these three dimensions are the ones that I'm going to elaborate on next diversity multi-modality and pedagogy so we came up with this word multi literacy if you do a google search now you'll find lots and lots of mentions of this word but there we were we thought we didn't bend a word really to contrast what we were doing with literacy in the singular so what literacy in the singular meant historically was learning the
standard form of a national language all the kids were coming to school we were going to teach them to read and write correctly we're going to teach them maybe get rid of various registers and accents a standard form of the language which is what we did in nation-states where we wanted people to be fundamentally the same one of the functions the modern state was to make people the same in school provided a kind of a vehicle to do that and one of the tools was this thing called C literacy in the singular and what you
did is you learn a whole lot of rules you learned how to spell you learned grammatical rules what's good grammar and what's bad grammar but also you learned the high canonical forms the language in in by the time you got to study something called literature so this is what literacy historically meant and what we wanted to do with the word multi literacies was to build a kind of a counterpoint to build an alternative and we had two kinds of intentions one was multi around culture and and differences between human beings and the other was multi
around multi-modality let me talk about each of those two aspects of multi the first one was the fact that in fact kids come to school with all sorts of dialect kids come to school speaking other languages this is a multilingual world increasingly in a world of extraordinary migrations so you know to say that we were just going to do literacy and to write over all those differences was both an ethical problem but also a pedagogical problem but but our view of literacy in the plural was that it wasn't just other languages being ignored it wasn't
just other dialects being ignored but it was also different registers different discourses so you know when you go to a doctor there are actually two different discourses going on one is the professional discourse of medicine and the other is the discourse with which us ordinary mortals speak about health and there's a kind of if you like a cross-cultural thing going on there in the sense that perspectives on the world our knowledge of the world our understanding of the world is based if you like on two different ways of speaking two different forms of discourse even
in a doctor-patient relationship and in a world where there are these incredible specialisms people going off on tangents a whole lot of sub cultural variety in fact what we do in our everyday lives is not speak the same talk talk the same talk speak the same speech it isn't that it's actually dealing with differences trying to understand the other person whose way of speaking ways of understanding the world way ways of knowing the world ways of interpreting the world which might be professional they might be technical they might be just simply you know one's life
experience these are differences so what we end up dealing with all the time is in fact discursive differences right and Courtney castor who was one of our group pointed us to this whole tradition of what's called contrastive linguistics instead of linguistics as a generic thing the language we all speak you know what are the differences and how do we negotiate those differences in our everyday lives so that was the first aspect of multi the second one was and look we were we started thinking this through we met in 1994 the Harvard ed Review piece was
published in 1996 the world wide web happened in 1993 but not many people knew about it the day had happened Facebook didn't happen till the turn of the century but what we already saw was a phenomenon a textual phenomenon which we called multi-modality rarely anymore does text exist by itself yeah it does in novels perhaps there are not many places though where text still exists by itself if you take magazines you take television you know the first way of television it was really almost entirely visual but now if you watch a sports channel or you
watch business channel it's this crazy mix of images overlaid with text the web is just image and text on top of each other and a kind of an interesting radical thing that happened with digitization which is the capacity in the same technology to create image and sound and text all of the same stuff so in fact we were just on the cusp of this coming of radical model multi modality which was facilitated by digital technologies so we theorized that and we said there are a number of different modes which we have to think about in
conjunction which is image beside text and also besides space and also beside embodiment which is you know here we are doing a video recording and you're looking at our hands and our movements and our bodies and and and also with sound so all of these things were coming together so we built this theory of the multi modality of contemporary literacies where when we just do grammar in sentences and literature in novels we're leaving out the reality of contemporary communication so this is what motivated us to create this word multi literacies is a counterpoint to the
historical notion of literacy in the singular
