Multiliteracy

The article “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” argues that to survive in an unprecedented and ever evolving future (which, let’s face it, could never have predicted the existence of memes and reddit in the innocent age of an internet in its 90s infancy), we must learn to better survive and process in our production-line world. Multiliteracy relates back to the increasing “integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral, and so on.”

PostFordism (that is, the world according to Henry Ford’s assembly line model of living) changes the hierarchical structure of interaction within our personal, public, educational, and work fields from a vertical pyramid of authority to a horizontal production line of equals. The goal of an educator in this world is not to create compliant worker, even though is exactly what the system is built to produce, but instead sculpt a generation of students with critical thinking skills that can use more than one literacy to think outside the box and overcome the structure that, ever since the cold war, has instilled in the world a market minded approach to education.

The article argues that multiliteracy affects us at every level: It changes the way we do our work, interact in our public lives, and live our private lives. It gives examples that by making students the designers of their own content, they are made to think more completely and complexly about the idea they are attempting to realize and diversify their products. Multiliteracy fights the market system of the public and social sector and attempts to establish civic pluralism (meaning, it helps us diversify ourselves in public spaces. Or even more simply put, it helps us stand out in the crowd). We can also use multiliteracy to fight back the invasion of our private lives by layering the ways we interact with the world.

For educational institutions to keep up with this changing pedagogy, the article argues that institutions must open themselves to the full capabilities of multiliteracy and not fall into the regimented teaching structure present in the years before. They can do this by employing flexible and open ended metalanguage.

On a personal level, I believe that this article, while well intentioned and relevant for its published year, is outdated significantly. The internet evolves so rapidly and anachronistically, that while the London Group’s definitions of the future of the internet and communication are all encompassing when it comes to programs and people becoming multiliterate, it’s like saying that Elvis Presley and KISS are relevant for the same reasons just because they come from the same ancestry of rock and roll. You can see the similarities, but they were never intentioned for the same audience.

I also don’t understand the necessity to teach multiliteracy. If multitasking is inherent to human nature, and if the machine is us and we teach the machine, then the internet ultimately learned multiliteracy from us already. So we must have in inherent in our capacity to learn. Education systems and the different layers of the lifeworld (as the article says, our personal spheres of relationship with the world) have been structured against it for ages, but that doesn’t mean it has taught us how not to do it.

(Also, here is my Prezi)