Arrested Pulse

In 2000, a group of educators who had been meeting regularly over the years in New London, Connecticut, came out with a book that has become a bible for literacy researchers and teachers. The New London Group's Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning the the Design of Social Futures is a collection of several articles ranging from new (multi_literacy theories to their pedagogical applications. Here are some questions and responses to central tenets of that text.

How does the New London Group’s perspective on language (and other semiotic systems) as resources — and on composing in many modes (visual, oral/aural, text) — change literacy practices and the teaching of literacy, especially composition?

In the past, literacy was conceived as a “carefully restricted project—restricted to formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (9). This kind of project has its origins in the old nation-state societies in which standardized forms of a dominant dialect were cultivated over vernacular dialects (Lo Bianco, 95). Arguments against the inclusion of non-standard englishes like Ebonics in school curricula and the call to make a standardized version of English the “official” language of the United States are rooted in this kind of unilingualism.

A multiliteracies pedagogy denaturalizes this unilingualism, renders communication practices “available to scrutiny” and justifies giving space to “other” languages in school curricula — thereby serving to resist and possibly even reverse the effects print-based, globalized English has had on world communication practices (e.g., the “linguicide” of indigenous languages) (100).

How to effect such changes?

The NLG sets out to promote a pedagogy based on the “new heuristic” (36) of Design. This pedagogy is not concerned with the past's focus on language usage but on “social futures” based on relations of collaboration and creativity, mass media access, and communities that are “diverse and respectful of the autonomy of lifeworlds” (19). Composition, consequently, is multimodal and recursive. Students create texts out of their encounters with different texts — and not just print texts; the texts they create, the Redesigned, should not be seen as the “end result” or “product” of this process; rather, the Redesigned is an emerging pattern harnessed for specific purposes within specific contexts that becomes another Available Design, a resource for yet another Designing Process.

Composition as conceived by the NLG results from hybridization and intertextuality. Meanings are constituted by the relationships between texts and text types (auditory/visual/print). Students construct meaning by putting different texts and types of texts into conversations with each other. In other words, students don’t look “in here” (into their “mind”) or “out there” (into the cosmos) for meaning, but rather at the social, cultural, and material artifacts that surround them, and which they use as resources when constructing, often collaboratively, knowledge.

The NLG’s pedagogy emphasizes that successful, democratic classroom is one in which communication practices are contextualized. “There is, of course,” James Paul Gee asserts, “no such thing as ‘school language’ or ‘academic language’ as single things. There are, rather, many different school languages, different styles of language used in different school practices” (63). Old capitalism valued decontextualized school language—language that was taken outside of the “context of daily face-to-face interaction” which students encountered at home and in their neighborhoods (63).

The standard five-paragraph essay is an example of this decontexualization. It is a “foreign” language to pretty much everyone — but especially to minority and poor communities whose encounters with this kind of discourse are less frequent and meaningful than those of people who come from enfranchised communities (63). The NLG, therefore, promotes a contextualized literacy (and hence a contextualized composition) as Situated Practice — “embodied experiences of authentic and meaningful social practices involving talk, texts, tools, and technologies of the sort that help one imagine contexts that render what is being taught meaningful” (67). Composition takes place within contextalized environments with which students have some degree of familiarity and facility; the (re)arrangement of material drawn from such contexts create new meanings and new knowledge (the ephemeral Redesigned), thereby expanding contexts in new and meaningful directions.

What reasons does the NLG offer in support of these changed practices?

I think the most basic reason is that these new practices reflect the social and cultural world we live in. The new world of multiple communication channels and an increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity, a world in which there is “no such thing as a singular, canonical English” (5). We all inhabit different lifeworlds — working lives, public lives, and personal lives — and new composition and literacy practices must be informed by “an epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to leave behind different subjectivities” (18).

Providing access to all people — not just the enfranchised — is a central goal of the Multiliteracies Project, which Gee refers to as a “Bill of Rights for all children.”
Another reason given in support of changed composition practices is the changing nature of capitalism. New, or “fast,” capitalism has ushered in technologies “such as the iconographic, text, and screen-based modes of interacting with automated machinery” which has created, for people living in such systems, “new social relationships of work” (11-12). Gee argues that fast capitalism is a distributed system with no center, no discrete individuals, no fixed or essential qualities. In order to survive in such a system, we need to see ourselves as a “portfolio” of rearrangeable skills and identities: “You are, in this way, your projects” (47).

The NLG argues that there are “multiple layers to everyone’s identity, there are multiple discourses of identity, and multiple discourses of recognition to be negotiated” (17). Such a conception of human identity in this brave new (postmodern) world underscores the NLG’s promotion of literacy pedagogies which take into consideration “modes of representation much broader than language alone” (5) in the process of constructing knowledge.

Changed composition practices reflect changed ways of understanding how language is used and for what purposes, which can serve to ameliorate conditions which keep some people and some cultures from achieving their potential.

Developing a contextualized pedagogy that provides students with a metalanguage for communication practices, one the allows students to think critically about their own learning processes, can have beneficial effects on communities and cultures, as Martin Nakata argues: “The development of a metalanguage appropriate to Islander classrooms and contexts is crucial, for there is much confusion for Islander students as they code-switch between at least two and sometimes three languages and in cross-cultural contexts” (119). Such an approach not only empowers individual students and communities, it provides a framework for cross-cultural understanding—a vital necessity in this increasingly networked, globalized, pluralistic world we inhabit.

How do the main goals of multiliteracies relate to your own goals with respect to teaching composition?

One way the goals of Multiliteracies relates to my own goals as a teacher of composition stems from an experience I had circa 1998 I was teaching a Basic Writing class at Northeastern University that was made up mostly of African-American and Hispanic students, with a few working-class Whites in the mix. It was a very good class in that I had established a good relationship with. They though I was “funny” and I thought they were “fun.” It was in this class that I became aware of multiple literacies (and lifeworlds) of the kind central to this text.

There was a student in my class, Dooley, who really liked me a lot. He was a black male of about 25 years old. Whenever I came into the classroom he’d yell out, “He’s here! Da MAN!” and I interrogated him about what he meant by that, because Malcolm X used to call the white man (who, prior to his transformative trip to Mecca, was also evil) “The Man,” but Dooley assured me that his calling me that was a term of respect and endearment (although he didn’t use those words). Anyway, he was a pretty good writer, but his speech was clumsy—kind of like Jian’s in the last chapter of the book—he halted a lot, he stammered. I actually wondered if he had a speech impairment or a disability of some sort.

But then one afternoon I was in the outskirts of Roxbury (a predominantly Black neighborhood, very low-income) and stopped by a pizza joint for lunch. Dooley was in that place with two friends. When he saw me enter the restaurant, he called me over to join him and his friends. Our booth became a kind of contact zone—me: white, “old” (in my thirties), educated, enfranchised, professional; and them: young, Black, probably living in public housing, far from the professional world other than for Dooley, the only one to come in the back doors of Northeastern through some sort of scholarship he got through the African American Studies Program.

Anyway, as I sat at the table, Dooley went on and on about many topics of conversation, speaking animatedly, fluidly, expressively, beautifully—very much the opposite of what I encountered from him in class. And it was then I realized that he didn’t have a speech impediment or a disability. He was speaking his home language, in which he was fluent; in the classroom, he was attempting to speak “my language,” the language of the school and of white people more generally perhaps, with which he was not fluent.

I realized after that pizza lunch that fluency (read: literacy) is the result of one’s being at home with a language or really any semiotic system with which they are familiar. At the table that day I was rendered illiterate in the discourse used by Dooley and his two friends because it was not of my lifeworld. Since then I have consciously tried to make a space for these different englishes and modes of expression / communication in my classroom, and have invited students to write papers in their own voice (which they actually sometimes resist, which is fine).

But I at least try to get them to write about topics that are lived experiences for them, no matter how seemingly “nonacademic” they are; I feel that by inviting them to draw on the available designs of their lifeworlds in designing a project for an academic venue they are empowering themselves and, hopefully, once the project has been successfully completed, transforming either themselves or the topic they’re composing or both.