A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures
The New London Group 1996

• Courtney Cazden
• Bill Cope
• Norman Fairclough
• James Gee
• Mary Kalantzis
• Gunther Kress
• Carmen Luke
• Allan Luke
• Sarah Michaels
• Martin Nakata
Countries represented:
USA, Australia, Great Britain

"Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students."

• How do we ensure that the differences of culture, language, and gender are not barriers to educational success?
• What are the implications of these differences (culture, language, and gender) for literacy pedagogy?
**Keep these questions in mind. After we present some more information, we're going to have you share your thoughts.

Changing Realities Designing Social Futures
Working Lives: Fast Capitalism/PostFordism Productive Diversity ex) Being able to follow your supervisor's orders to being able to participate in oral, informal, interpersonal discourse (more teamwork)
Public Lives: Decline of Public Pluralism Civic Pluralism- enjoy seeking out your culture ex) "Melting Pot" to "Salad Bowl" and negotiating between cultures/dialects/cross-cultural discourses (code switching)
Private Lives: Invasion of Private Space Multilayered Lifeworlds ex) Communities used to be limited by clear boundaries (Italian community, business community, gay community). Now, people can belong to many communities; the boundaries are blurred.

Designs of Meaning
Available Designs: Resources for meaning; Available Designs of meaning
Designing: The work performed on/with Available Designs in the semiotic process
The Redesigned: The resources that are reproduced and transformed

• The resources for design
• The Order of Discourse o
"An order of discourse is the structured set of conventions associated with semiotic activity (including use of language) in a given social space" o
How the discourse of African American L.A. gangs relate to the discourse of the L.A. police

Work within the semiotics:
• Semantics : Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
• Syntactics : Relations among signs in formal structures
• Pragmatics : Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them

• Linguistic Meanings: Features of intonation, stress, rhythm, accent, vocabulary and metaphor, word choice, positioning, how information is presented in clauses and sentences, etc.
• Visual Meanings (images, page layouts, screen formats);
Audio Meanings (music, sound effects); Gestural Meanings
(body language, sensuality); Spatial Meanings (the meanings of environmental spaces, architectural spaces); and
Multimodal Meanings

Situated Practice: Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses, including those from the students' lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces.
Overt Instruction: Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding. In the case of multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning.
Critical Framing: Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular
Designs of meaning. This involves the students' standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context.
Transformed Practice: Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites.

1. How do we ensure that differences of culture, language, and gender are not barriers to educational success?
3. The New London Group asserts that we have many different Discourses. That we can be "different people at different times." Do you think this statement is true? Why or why not?
2. What are the implications of these differences (culture, language, and gender) on literacy pedagogy?
4. Did you notice any connection between this and our other readings?