The New London Group article is a long and rather heavy one to me. Long not just in terms of length but also in terms of the number of ideas and concepts put forth, which adds to its weight as well. Nevertheless, I still ploughed through it. In the end, the portion that hit me most was captured rather early in the article. It's the part on changing working lives.
The Group started by describing how the social relationship of work is changing from the "old Fordist organisation" to one that is informal and interpersonal, hence proclaiming "a new language of work". At this point, I was not convinced at all as I have personally witnessed and experienced corporate culture that is still very much formal and procedural.
The Group went on to state that "Replication of corporate culture demands assimilation to mainstream norms that only really works if one already speaks the language of the mainstream." I think there is much truth in this as the ones who do well are often those who can suss out the norms, work within and around those norms, and still find ways to be innovative and creative. I am starting to see the point that The Group is trying to make. However, as I read on, I was still not sure how this part on changing working lives applies to education even though it has the greatest impact on me, as I had mentioned earlier. This only started to come to light after the discussion in class and when I read the article a second time after class.
I can now see the relevance and the impact that multiliteracies has on our role as educators. There are two lines in the article that seemed to sum it up for me. They are "However, it may well be that market-directed theories and practices, even though they sound humane, will never authentically include a vision of meaningful success to all students." and "An authentically democratic view of schools must include a vision of meaningful success for all, a vision of success that is not defined exclusively in economic terms and that has embedded within it a critique of hierarchy and economic injustice."
We should leverage on the affordances of multiliteracies to help our students approach their lives and their learning from a much wider perspective, through different means afforded by the various technology that best suits their strengths and needs, to achieve variety of goals that may not be limited to economic gains alone.
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Hi Chiayen,
ReplyDeleteWe may be aware of the affordances of multiliteracies and that, we should leverage on them, but the challenge is .. how to? I think, we have been doing that but we don't realise it. At Primary 1 level, during shared book approach, students are encouraged to talk about the pictures with some guided questions by the teacher. Teacher uses not only the understanding level of questioning, but also comprehension and inferential questions (refer Bloom Taxonomy) . Listening comprehension and comprehension questions that require students to refer to a poster/ picture given, needs a higher level thinking. As students move into secondary school, they study design and technology... what I am trying to say here is.. students have been been exposed to multiliteracies but they are not made apparent. That's the reason (I think) the London group suggested that, one of the conditions to the 'how' pedagogy is to provide overt instructions., so that, students are more aware of the visual grammar in order to understand a multimodal text.
Thanks for your sharing Siti:) Yes, I agree with what you have shared. My son, who is in Primary 1 this year, shared with me that his English teacher sings them a related song before she reads them a story. That is utilising the different modes too yeah? Perhaps at his level, the key is to leverage on the affordances of multiliteracies to enable their learning?
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