Multiliteracies

Key Concept of Multiliteracies
To begin with, a pedagogy of multiliteracies is proposed by The New London Group (2000) as Design with its goal to prepare learners to interpret, express, and negotiate meaning in multifarious contexts. In the terms of Cope and Kalantzis (2006), the starting point of multiliteracy is to understand how texts are located and produced socially and historically. In this way, the New London Group, according to Cope and Kalantzis (2006), provides an organizing metaphor of meaning-as-design. In the same way, Kern (2000) sees the proposal as the design of meaning. Design is conceptualised as a way of meaning making in multimodal texts using metalanguage by virtues of understanding the pattern or grammar of semiotic and linguistic features (Cope & Kalantzis, 2006; The New London Group, 2000). Specifically, the Design consists of the Available Design, Designing, and Redesigned.
Design is used “to describe the forms of meaning” (The New London Group, 2000, p. 20). Available Design, in particular, is referred to as any forms of semiotic resources a particular society has developed from time to time that stand ready for the making meaning practices. Furthermore, in the context of classroom pedagogy, the teacher and students need a language (and or metalanguage) to describe the forms of meaning which is represented in the Available Design, for example, website, films, and photography. The patterns of the Available Design include the linguistic Design (vocabulary, transitivity, modality, coherence, etc), visual Design (images, page layout, screen, formats), audio Design (music and sound affects), gestural Design (body language), spatial Design (environmental and architectural spaces), and multimodal Design (the relation of two or more modes of meaning in a dynamic relationship).
While Available Design is concerned with the literacy practices of text interpretation, and to some extent, of text production, Designing is a further, consequent, process of text production. In order to produce texts, learners are required to be active not only to read, listen, and view texts, but also to write, speak, and shape these texts. In this case, Designing process is a process of transforming knowledge, social relation and identity, by means of producing new construction and representation of reality. Moreover, the completion of Designing lies in transformation, that is, the attainment along the processes of recycling the old material in the Available Design into new design of meaning (Kern, 2000).
Redesigned, on the other hand, involves the outcome from the Available Design through the process of Designing. The transformed meaning produced in the Redesigned will be positioned back to the Available Design; this is the point in which the cycle of three aspects of Design is complete.
Of primary importance in the three aspects of Design is the position of the Designer whose role is critical to make the three aspects of Design run as expected. In the context of literacy practices, therefore, Designer refers to the teacher. He or she selects and provides resources, sets up the conducive environment, and gives instructions for learning.
Multiliteracies Frameworks
As a matter of practice, the New London Group (2000) suggests four multiliteracies frameworks, those are the Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed practice. What follows is the detailed description of how the multiliteracies framework is implemented.
Situated Practice is a learners’ immersion into meaningful practice and their own authentic life experience. It involves the use of Available Design to make meaning. In relation to life experience, Cope and Kalantzis (in Pahl & Rowsell, 2005) suggest that Situated Practice will work based on the learners’ interest, real life experience with their prior knowledge, from home, school, communities for example their familiarity with TV, computer, internet, videogames and so forth. In the case of the Unit planning, I utilize their familiarity with internet including website and weblog. Weblog, in particular, is fairly popular among the freshmen because it is easy to create. Moreover, compared with a website which is more complicated, to create and maintain a weblog, the freshmen are required practically to follow three simple steps in the dashboard (see figure 1).
(figure 1. http://www.blogger.com/start)
The skill of creating a weblog is categorised as an expert novice (The New London Group, 2000). “[W]eblog entries,” Blood (2000) puts forth, “are made by typing directly into the browser and with the click of a button are instantly published on the internet”. Publishing directly in the internet is a kind of motivating activity to keep writing (to be discussed in the next section). A weblog can be seen as a kind of online journal that someone can continuously update with his or her own words, ideas, and thoughts through software that enables him/her to do it easily. Weblog is a multimodal Design involving Linguistic Design, Visual Design and can be Audio Design. Most of the content of the weblog is personal journal which involves Linguistic Design in which language is used to make meaning along with such elements as vocabulary and metaphor, transitivity, nominalisation of processes and local and global coherence. To be integrated in the Multimodal Design, Visual Design and Audio Design usually come along with the Linguistic design to support the meaning-making, for example, writing journal about event in the university (see. figure 2). At this point, the students can upload a picture related with the topic of the posting in the weblog. In addition, Visual Design is also displayed on the computer screen, such as frames, hyperlink, colours, layout, backgrouding and foregrounding. In their real life, students are exposed to reading and viewing other journals on the weblogs. My objective in the Unit is that students enable students to design a weblog.
(figure 2, http://ollscoil.blogspot.com)
Overt Instruction is defined as the use of metalanguages, content and function of the discourse of practice (The New London Group, 2000). It is a kind of teacher’s intervention in the meaning making process by means of scaffolding (Pahl & Rowsell, 2005). In this process, the students develop a language that describes how they make meaning by employing multimodal resources. They describe, for instance, in the Available Design, the patterns such as the Linguistic Design which involves content and sentence construction. In Visual design, the students, also, describe the pattern of the layout in which they can choose and modify the weblog template and setting, interpret why the picture has to be in a certain way, as well as interpret the colour they use, for example, green in figure 3 to symbolise Hulk, and the image of Hulk to symbolise strength and hero. Finally, they view the meaning of the journal writing in different ways.
example
(figure 3. http://incrediblehulk.blogspot.com/)
Critical Framing is seen as a reflection of what the purpose of design is, who the readers of the weblog journal are, and who the writers are. In this stage, students reconceive their learning around their own culture and the cultures of others (Pahl & Rowsell, 2005). From their viewing personal journals in weblogs, students discuss the different cultural contexts because the personal journals can be written in many languages as can be seen in figure 4. In the case of my students, they will read in Bahasa Indonesia and English. Eventually, they will come to understand why they are different when they relate their local context, values and belief with the global ones, such as in figure 4, the local context is represented in the language use; values and belief is shown on the template design, and the global one is implied in figure 3. The teacher’s role in this stage is to help them ‘deneutralise’ the text and make strange what they have learnt. Put differently, students are helped to ‘problematise’ and challenge the texts as ‘text analysts’ in the Four Resources Model terms. Thereby, they can “constructively critique it; account for its cultural location; creatively extend and apply it; and eventually innovate their own, within old communities and in new ones.”(The New London Group, 2000, p. 34).
(figure 4. http://dust-raider.blogspot.com/)
Transformed Practice allows students to apply and modify what they have learned. This is part of the Redesigning text such as creating new texts on the basis of the existing ones. This practice primarily deals with the application of the Design in different contexts as a result of Overt Instruction and Critical Framing. In the Unit planning, the students may write their personal journals in their own context. for example, to be more useful in developing their language learning (see figure 4), they will write their journal for sharing with readers about their extraordinary language learning experience instead of writing a non-topical journal, or they will transform ‘personal’ journal into ‘intellectual’ journal (Kern, 2000, p. 193). Figure 4 exemplifies the result of Transform Practice. This Redesigned is going to be the Available Design later in the next cycle.
(figure 4. http://roni-languagelearningjournal.blogspot.com)