New London Group

These guys seem to be the "big enchilada"--the ones who started all of this multimodal, multiliteracies, multisemiotics uproar.

"A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." The New London Group, Eds. Harvard Educational Review. Spring 1996.

The New London group states their two primary goals to be:

1) "to extend the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies, for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate."

2) "that literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies. This includes understanding and competent control of representational forms that are becoming increasingly significant in the overall communications environment, such as visual images and their relationship to the written word."

A pedagogy that embraces multiliteracies then is one that 1) considers the multicultural and diverse society that we all live in and 2) broadens our understanding of "literature" to include multimedia and visual forms of literacy. For example, wikis, text messages, blogs, visual texts such as comics and graphic novels, film, video games, slam poetry.

This type of classroom might look much different than the ones that many of us were raised in. A multiliterate pedagogy might ask us to consider how, not only print texts and standard written forms of literature contribute to our understanding of the world around us, but how we "read" visual and technological texts and what these new forms of "literature" speak to us as well.

The New London Group is the name designated to a group of 10 scholars from around the country who are dedicated to the question of the evolution of literacy education. Among the scholars listed are Courtney Cazden, Bill Cope, James Gee, Gunther Kress, Norman Fairclough, and Sarah Michaels. Although each member comes from diverse backgrounds, each "agreed that in each of the English-speaking countries [they] came from, what students needed to learn was changing, and that the main element of this change was that there was not a singular, canonical English that could or should be taught anymore. Cultural differences and rapidly shifting communications media meant that the very nature of the subject - literacy pedagogy - was changing radically."

A distinction between "mere literacy" and "multiliteracies" is considered in the article as well:

"'mere literacy'" remains centered on language only, and usually on a singular national form of language at that, which is conceived as a stable system based on rules such as mastering sound-letter correspondence. This is based on the assumption that we can discern and describe correct usage. Such a view of language will characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy. A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects."

The new multiliteracies design lists six new elements that contribute to the process of meaning making: Linguistic Meaning, Visual Meaning, Audio Meaning, Gestural Meaning, Spatial Meaning, and the Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes of meaning to each other

The article goes on to define the different modes of multiliterate design while considering a critical framework for this work.