Comment on “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”

I have read this article twice, once in ASE 401 and now in AAE 439. Honestly, I do not quite get some parts. However, here is what I understood so far from the NLG article. We know that NLG had generally viewed the mission of education as to “ensure students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to be able to participate fully in public community and economic life”. Hence, in my opinion, to allow the mission to be met, education now has to mirror the all-encompassing and integrated environmental prints and information-delivering medium that is multifaceted in nature.

Bringing this issue to close to home, the following excerpt of an article I found online, though dated back to 2006, suggest how media and even business platform has evolved.

"If we recast old media into this model, traditional print media encompasses the following: newspaper, journals, magazines, radio and TV. To be fair, the old media industry has now consolidated into large corporations and the management have a very strong control towards what gets transmitted to the people. The new media revolutionized by the birth of the internet, is now championed by the world wide web and open source ideals of sharing information, ... which basically invoke the technologies of blogging, podcasting and video-casting... A few years ago, when Amazon first came to being, the traditional bookstores were threatened. In the end, the traditional bookstores set up their homepages which also catered to selling books online. Actually, some of them have now worked with Amazon to merge into similar services. ..Yet, the new media issue is more complex, because it relates to the freedom of speech and expression. Citizen journalism has transformed the way how large corporations sought to control the media to their own purpose. A good case study in our local community is the STOMP."

(Source: http://sgentrepreneurs.com/marketing-branding/2006/06/15/new-media-vs-old-media/ )

Based on Amazon and the new media issue cited above, I would imagine that when one speaks of Multiliteracies Pedagogy, I would picture a classroom that is filled with computers (working ones, of course) and pupils participating in online discussions through forums to share and gain ideas with the purpose of probably completing a presentation on a recent unit. As the classroom teacher of this language classroom, it is my duty to encourage pupils to explore and not constraint themselves to being monocultural, formalised and restricted to rule-governed forms of language simply because of the way different aspects of how unconventional information is represented today. The complexity and freedom of today’s world in terms of representing ideas and information publicly or economically seeks for teachers to infuse these aspects in their lessons so that students will not only be prepared but also remain relevant in today’s world where in the case of the article, the world that our children will grow up to would be one where they have the power to manipulate and be in charge of how information would appear to the world by redesigning what they know.

At the end of the day, equipping students with the skills to integrate, represent and view the diverse form of media, and simultaneously realise the affordances of each type of design element and its impact on how to deliver their intention or purpose in the assigned task is essential. Teaching them (Intertextuality) the different mode of meaning (design elements) and its potential also gives students the opportunities to not only understand what they see today, but also aids them in representing their ideas/information similarly in today’s complexity. This is what the pedagogy of Multiliteracies means to me.