No abstract

With the rise of new technologies and media, the way we communicate is rapidly changing. Literacies provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy pedagogy within today's new media environment. It focuses not only on reading and writing, but also on other modes of communication, including oral, visual, audio, gestural and spatial. This focus is designed to supplement, not replace, the enduringly important role of alphabetical literacy. Using real-world examples and illustrations, Literacies features the experiences of both teachers and students. It maps a range of methods that teachers can use to help their students develop their capacities to read, write and communicate. It also explores the wide range of literacies and the diversity of socio-cultural settings in today's workplace, public and community settings. With an emphasis on the 'how-to' practicalities of designing literacy learning experiences and assessing learner outcomes, this book is a contemporary and in-depth resource for literacy students.

After a brief history of the context and evolution of the idea of Multiliteracies, this chapter focuses on its pedagogy. Originally framed as Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing, and Transformed Practice, these four orientations were subsequently translated in the Learning by Design project into the 'Knowledge Processes' of Experiencing, Conceptualizing, Analyzing and Applying. The chapter explores the roots of these orientations in what it characterizes as 'didactic' and 'authentic' pedagogies. Learning by Design is by comparison 'reflexive', combining elements of each of these traditions into a new synthesis. The chapter goes on to spell out the pedagogical specifics of each of the Knowledge Processes, then their epistemological basis as distinctive kinds of ' knowledge-action'. We conclude by contrasting the cognitive emphases of both didactic and authentic pedagogy with the epistemological theory of learning that underpins Learning by Design. Its focus is on action rather than cognition-not what we know, but the things we do to know. Towards a pedagogy of Multiliteracies The short history of a word 'Literacy' is a term that presents itself as emphatic and singular. The emphatic part accompanies the modern insistence that everyone has at least 'basic' levels of competency in reading and writing. 'Literacy' in this sense means some quite definite things to be acquired: to read the ordinary texts of modern society-newspapers, information books, novels; to be able to write using correct spelling and grammar; and to appreciate high-cultural values through exposure to a taste of the literary canon. The singular part arises when literacy is presented as a single, official or standard form of language, one right way to write, and an idealized canon of authors conventionally considered 'great'. By the mid-1990s, the emphatic and singular connotations of the term 'literacy' were beginning to work not-so-well. The mass media and then the internet spawned whole new genres of text which meant that narrowly conventional understandings of literacy were fast becoming anachronistic.

No abstract

No abstract