Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Rewriting Goldilocks

Heather Lotherington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136644207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012!

Based on case studies from public schools in Toronto, Canada, this book chronicles an inspiring five-year journey to develop thinking about and teaching literacy for the 21st century. The research, which was classroom-based and developed by public school teachers in collaboration with university researchers, was stimulated by an ethnographic study at Joyce Public School to track children learning to read in an era of multiliteracies.

Following the kindergarteners' interest in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Lotherington asked the principal: What would Goldilocks look like, retold through the eyes of the children? The resulting classroom experiment to transform learning to read a storybook into multimodal collaborative story-telling sparked the development of an award-winning school-university learning community dedicated to the development of multimodal literacies in the culturally diverse, urban classroom.

Pedagogy of Multiliteracies tells the evolving story of teachers' trial-and-error interventions to engage children in multiple modes of expression involving structured play with contemporary media. Using the complex texts created, the teachers carve spaces to welcome the voices of children and the languages of the community into the English-medium classroom.

1 In Pursuit of a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Preparatory Thinking about Multiliteracies

When the New London Group coined the term, multiliteracies, to capture the essence of literacy and literacy education “to include negotiating a multiplicity of discourses” (1996, p. 61), I was lecturing in the Department of Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. I had made a bold move from teaching English as a second language pedagogy in a Department of Education and Psychology to Sociolinguistics, focused on bilingual education and minority language maintenance. I had refocused my research from English language and literacy education in a postcolonial context¹ to literacy as lived by bi- and multilingual adolescents in a society whose political and social welcomes to multiculturalism were somewhat at odds.

The context of my research had changed considerably: from the small national capital of Fiji where the dominant language was a nonsettler post-colonial inheritance intended to bridge the diverse languages and cultures of the Island Pacific and orient education to a larger world, to a large cosmopolitan city in an English settler country attracting migrants from around the world through a multiculturalism policy of some 20 years that had pulled the cultural concept of Australian from its assumed racial homogeneity (Mishra, 2001). English was part of the magnet. Minority languages in the context of Melbourne were relegated to smaller, less public and very differently valued spaces.

During my tenure at the Language and Society Centre at Monash in the late 1990s, as the world of hypermedia was blossoming, I was dismayed to discover that the multiple literacies of the bilingual, bicultural high school students I was researching were being evaluated through a narrow, deficit lens that translated their multilingual reach as a problem (see Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1997). Political discussions of literacy were framed by the national survey of adult literacy that, in concert with similar surveys in Canada and the United States, tapped prose literacy, document literacy and quantitative literacy (Freebody & Lo Bianco, 1997; Gal, 2002; Watson & Callingham, 2003). As Gal (2002) makes clear, these literacies require the interpretation of complex texts, but it is evident that this interpretation is assessed in terms of cognitive operations. He explains, “Key processes include locating specific information in given texts or displays, cycling through various parts of diverse texts or displays, integrating information from several locations … and generating new information” (Gal, 2002, p. 8).

Bilingual and multilingual students’ competence in a variety of social literacies, spanning cultures, languages and media, fit poorly into the axiomatic model fixed on cognitive attainment and social fluency in English, so, though technically capable within a broad range of social and academic texts, these students, as nonnative speakers, were labeled a priori at risk of not achieving adequate literacy in a skills-based model (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1997; Lotherington, 2003b). These teens had developed the resources to find their way around a society that made geographic and political but not necessarily social spaces for them. In many cases, they were responsible for managing communications between their families and the broader society, as well. Exactly what risk were they at?

It seemed to me that the New London Group’s (1996) concept of multiliteracies captured the essence of why reading in more than one language should be a bonus, not a dilemma.

We want 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. Second, we argue 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-for instance, visual design in desktop publishing or the interface of visual and linguistic meaning in multimedia. Indeed, this second point relates closely back to the first; the proliferation of communications channels and media supports and extends cultural and subcultural diversity. (p. 61)

Freebody and Lo Bianco (1997) collocate the literate subject in Australia over the decades with morality in the 1950s, technical skill in the 1960s, deficit models of the disadvantaged in the 1970s and economics in the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, there was lively critical debate amongst scholars in Australia on literacy and education in a changing world (Freebody & Lo Bianco, 1997; Kress, 1997; Lankshear, 1997; A. Luke, 1993; Muspratt, Luke & Freebody, 1997; New London Group, 1996). A. Luke (2000) locates the trend in Australian literacy education in the 1990s towards enhancement of personal growth and skill development. However, he asserts that, from a sociological point of view, the purpose of literacy education should be to build enabling access to “literate practices and discourse resources” (p. 449). In a rapidly changing world strung together with digital connections of global reach, this is a moving target.

I left Melbourne, Australia, to take up an appointment in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada, in January 1999, informed by my valuable experiences with minority language maintenance in the Language and Society Centre at Monash University, and research associations and mentorship within Language Australia, but stymied by the awkwardly unbridged professional spaces I met in Australia between English as a second language, minority language maintenance, and literacy acquisition and development. I accepted a position in Multilingual Education, aiming to bring language and literacy concerns together for teachers and learners alike, whose needs and concerns are not channeled into neat disciplinary pockets.

Finding a Context for Studying Multiliteracies

Shortly after taking up my position at York University, a senior colleague invited me to participate as research associate in an international survey of technologically innovative schools. Delighted to participate, I chose to visit two urban schools in the Toronto area, leaving targeted schools across Canada to research assistants, who, as graduate students, had fewer opportunities to travel.

Both the schools in the greater Toronto area (GTA) visited by our research team provided eye-opening experiences. Children in elementary school at the turn of the millennium were creating websites to illustrate black holes and composing music in a MIDI² lab. Teachers and administrators were experimenting with digital technologies in their lessons, professional development programs and school organization in ways that were highly instructive to us at the university level.

One of those schools was Joyce Public School.³

I bumped into one of the teachers I had interviewed at Joyce Public School (JPS) some time later and he extended an invitation to attend a celebration scheduled at the school that week. It was a wonderful feeling to walk back into JPS, which literally pulsed with a quest for learning-as messy and beautiful process, not perfect recall and display. In chatting with the principal, Cheryl Paige, I enthusiastically confessed that I would love to do ethnographic research at a school like JPS. This is normally the moment when principals look at the researcher shrewdly and ask what we want, what they get out of it, and then promise to get back on that. Cheryl smiled broadly and said, “What a great idea! When can you start?”

And so it was that in 2003, I spent my sabbatical year at Joyce Public School in Toronto, in a pocket of a city noted for high cultural and linguistic diversity, to understand how literacy in the 21st century was understood, taught and assessed.

Joyce Public School

Joyce Public School is located in a neighborhood of mixed housing and small industry in the northwest quadrant of the city. The principal explains to me that the surrounding middle-class housing—single-family dwellings with well-kept front and back yards—does not represent the true catchment area of the school. The children of the Italian and Portuguese immigrants who have populated this pocket of the city typically attend the local Catholic school. The children attending JPS live in a nearby densely populated block of four high-rise apartment buildings. The school population, typical of inner-city schools, is characterized by high cultural diversity and low socioeconomic status. These children do not have ready access to the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991) that grounds school literacy. Though the percentage of children attending the school who speak a language other than English or French at home and in the community varies from year to year with the new intake, it regularly falls at more than two thirds of the school population. In 2009–2010, it was 68%.⁴

JPS has been federally and provincially designated as a pedagogically innovative school in its uses of information and communications technology.⁵ The school developed a focus on technologically enhanced learning at the turn of the century to boost educational opportunities for local children. Many teachers as well as the principal have been honored with prestigious citations and awards for outstanding achievement in education.

What I was introduced to at Joyce Public School was an elementary school that was dynamic and visionary, invested in technological mediation, dedicated to children’s learning and supportive of teachers and teaching. Serving a population of children who are culturally and linguistically diverse, and whose families are, on the whole, not well established, socially or economically, the school offered an ideal microcosm of urban Canadian society in which to observe emergent literacy education in practice.

Observing Multiliteracies in Action at Elementary School

I spent my sabbatical leave in 2003 conducting ethnographic research at JPS. The instigating force behind my participation at JPS as observer, and later, as I became a familiar figure at the school, as class helper, story reader and English as a second language (ESL) assistant, was the late 20th century turn to multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996). The social changes propagating the activist writing of the New London Group collective (1996) had already changed beyond their vision, websites having morphed from the static Web 1.0 of their times into the interactive web, or, as it is better known, Web 2.0. How well was literacy education keeping up with the onslaught of social change?

Given urban children’s realities in learning to communicate in a sophisticated media-saturated society in a language and cultural framework not native to most of them and amid multiple and increasing calls for the revision of traditional literacy curricula in a post-typographic era, I wanted to know:

1. What constitutes success in literacy acquisition for children in the linguistically heterogeneous, urban (elementary) classroom?
2. What obstacles do children face in acquiring school literacies?
3. How does a theory of multiliteracies take shape in practice in the elementary classroom?

Becoming Part of the JPS Community

I bemember you! (Kindergartener, 2003)

I loved entering the school, which always hummed with activity. Hallways were filled with bouncing little children trying (and failing) to stay in organized lines, whose gap-toothed smiles and spontaneous comments about little sisters and haircuts counteracted the early morning commute. My regular school visits included a variety of classes and venues around the school from the library to the lunchroom. I studied the gallery of art showcased on the school walls, and attended school meetings and after-school events. I chatted with the principal whenever she had a few moments, discussing social and political issues impacting education amongst the random happenings on the school grounds.

In the principal’s bustling office, I was immersed in the nerve center of school administration; she was constantly interrupted by phone calls, secretarial announcements and questions, appointments, children needing help—tears soothed over a lost paper or a serious dressing down for beating up another kid—teachers’ queries on issues beyond my prior imagining from what to do about a kindergarten child who had mistimed a trip to the washroom with dire consequences (regulations prohibit a teacher cleaning the child up, which is intimate contact), to 911 calls in response to a child’s anaphylactic reaction not responding to his EpiPen (which the school administers via a well-documented file on each child’s medical needs). While we wrote grants together in her office, she dealt with bullying parents threatening to sue; a violator entering the school building (and caught promptly by teachers); and the infamous peepee bandit, who mysteriously left a daily afternoon puddle just outside the second floor boys’ washroom.

Cheryl always made sure to tell me how happy she was to have me in the school. One day in conversation in her office, talking about kindergarten children, she mentioned in passing that she would love to have volunteers come into the school to read stories to the large number of children who entered school needing exposure to English and narrative structure. I began to think about bringing high school students into the school to read to the little ones as a volunteer task fulfilling their secondary school community service requirements. Unfortunately we never quite worked out how to circumvent time problems, as high school students had to attend their own classes when they were needed in the elementary school, though I did find many teens keen to volunteer. So I read to the children myself.

I began in Sandra Cheng’s⁶ kindergarten, where there was a small library nook consisting of a bookshelf and a child-sized plastic table and chairs. Sandra, who had previously videotaped children retelling a story to analyze their familiarity with English and with story structure, had concerns about specific children, and referred them to me one at a time in the library corner during thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1.In Pursuit of a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• 2.Competing Visions of Language and Literacy Education: Theory, Policy and New Directions for Practice
• 3.Rewriting Goldilocks and the Three Bears
• 4.Goldilocks Revisited: Telling Old Stories in New Ways
• 5.Genre-Bending: Transcoding Narratives
• 6.Creating Dialogic Spaces for Learning
• 7.Multimodality, Language Inclusion, and Third Space
• 8.Towards an Emergent Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• Notes
• References
• Index