Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”

Abstract

In this article, we explore our concern with the way youth identities and literacy research and practices are framed through a dominant conceptual paradigm in new literacy studies, namely, as articulated in the 1996 New London Group's "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." More than any other text, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" streams powerfully through doctoral programs, edited volumes, books, journal reviews, and calls for conference papers, as the central manifesto of the new literacies movement. In what follows, we draw heavily from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to take issue with the New London Group's disciplined rationalization of youth engagement in literacies. We organize our critical exploration of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" around Lee, a 10-year-old boy we follow through one day as he engages in reading and playing with text from Japanese manga. Our goal with this rereading is to reassert the sensations and movements of the body in the momentby-moment unfolding or emergence of activity. This nonrepresentational approach describes literacy-related activity not as projected toward some textual end point but as living its life in the ongoing present, forming relations and connections across signs, objects, and bodies in often unexpected ways. Such activity is saturated with affect and emotion; it creates and is fed by an ongoing series of affective intensities that are different from the rational control of meanings and forms. It helps us to keep the distinction between description and prescription sharp and to begin imagining what else might be going on.

Disquietude: A Sonata-Form Inquiry into Multiliteracies Practices in an EAL Classroom

“…While most progressive educators dismiss rote memory work and "drill and kill" exercises, my students fondly remember memorizing the poetry of their national icons, popular folk songs, and oral histories; this is embodied knowledge, when learning happens with and through the body, in which affect, imagination, passion, energy, and action are stimulated (Leander & Boldt, 2012). This knowledge is entwined learners' sense of self, their cultural, religious and academic identities.…”

“…The pedagogy also carries an assumption that all youth literacy practices, whether responding to comic book characters or sharing photos on social media, are deliberate, inherently purposeful, goal directed acts; young people, as meaning-makers, are assumed to be active "designers of (their) social futures" (NLG, 1996, p. 65). While this may be true for some, it may also be an illustration of young people using literacy practices for the sheer pleasure of it (Leander & Boldt, 2012). It may be that there are many reasons why young learners engage in literacy practices, print-based or digital.…”

“…When young people's activities become in-class assignments that are shaped and directed by product oriented, text-driven teachers, we strip away the freedom, spontaneity and pleasure that are central to literacies in use among youth and young adults (Leander & Boldt, 2012). Is it possible for me to introduce more indeterminacy into my teaching practice, to hand over ownership to my students, and if necessary, let projects fail?…”

Learning from Ninjas: young people’s films as a lens for an expanded view of literacy and language

“…This helped us understand the affordances that were drawn upon in multimodal interaction and the possibilities of tracing communicative practices across from object to sound and singing to spoken word and then to gesture and embodied responses. This led to the work of Leander and Boldt (2013) who argued for a more embodied and sensory understanding of literacy practices. The nuanced discussions by Kuby et al (2015) articulated how young children's intra-actions between objects and texts mediated their meaning-making practices.…”

Time Travels in Literacy and Pedagogy: From Script to Screen

“…The multiliteracies project has been criticized (Leander & Boldt, 2013;Jacobs, 2013) and revised and revisited recently by Cope and Kalantzis (2012) who are using it to propose a wider pedagogical movement 'Learning by design' 4 which takes the key tenets of this approach and adapts and applies them across subject areas. Recent articulations clarify and render more accessible the fundamental core components which have been used in the analysis that follows.…”