Introduction
Two decades ago, the scholars in the New London Group (NLG) (1996; Cope and Kalantzis 2009a) predicted the many changes that we would see in the way we communicate, express ourselves, teach, and learn. Based on the trends on globalization and technology that they saw, they also proposed that the traditional concept of literacy , tied to the printed medium and to “a single, official, or standard form of language” (Cope and Kalantzis 2015, 1), and the way in which we taught it were inadequate for a generation for whom learning already involved much more than the printed, “official word.” What was needed was a definition and a pedagogy that would encompass not just the printed but also other modalities of communication present in the everyday reality in which the new generation was growing. In a globalized world, we were becoming multimodal and multilingual meaning makers, and therefore, we could no longer refer to “literacy ”: We needed to talk about “multiliteracies .” The notion of a “pedagogy of Multiliteracies ” was thus born, with the objective to “address the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social, or domain-specific contexts,” implying that “it [was] no longer enough for literacy teaching to focus solely on the rules of standards forms of the national language: …Learners [needed] to become able to negotiate differences in patterns of meaning from one context to the next” (Ibid., 3). It was no longer enough to teach “literacy” devoid of society’s various ways of making meaning: Learners needed to become aware that “every choice of text design represents particular stagings of the world, positionings and beliefs, reconstructed by the reader or writer through experience, associations, and analysis” (Samaniego and Warner 2016, 198), interpreting and understanding the specific literacy resources (e.g., linguistic and non-linguistic) that guide each different kind of text and the meaning that is to be conveyed.
The new pedagogy of Multiliteracies was theoretically connected to Halliday’s (1994) systemic functional linguistics (SFL) , whose overarching principle is that language is a semiotic system that cannot be separated from its social function, as it expresses meaning according to the different social contexts in which it is used. From this perspective, “language is a resource for making meaning in context and the context predicts or suggests the language that will be used…according to the social and cultural contexts in which meaning is exchanged” (Fang and Schleppegrell 2010, 591). In the pedagogy of Multiliteracies , the principles of SFL are present in the importance that the approach bestows upon the connections among language, culture, and meaning as they are realized in different multimodal meaning-making manifestations beyond printed texts and speech (Kress 2013). The approach, thus, allows us to guide learners in their understanding of “what still matters in traditional approaches to reading and writing [e.g., linguistic resources and genre], and [of] what is new and distinctive about the ways in which people make meaning in the contemporary communications environment” (Kalantzis et al. 2016, 1).
Since it was first presented by the NLG (1996), the pedagogy of Multiliteracies has undergone development and change .1 For example, specific pedagogical approaches, such as Learning by Design (Cope and Kalantzis 2015; Kalantzis et al. 2016), have originated from its tenets, and both earlier and more recent versions have guided a multitude of pedagogical projects in Australia and, in the last ten years, in the United States. This chapter examines some of the projects in Australia,2 focusing on the role that Learning by Design has played specifically in the teaching of English to minority students at all levels of instruction. This work also introduces the concept of Spanish heritage learner used throughout this book as well as analyzes the pedagogical needs of those students who can be classified as such, particularly focusing on university students in the United States. The final part of the chapter brings forward the idea that, based on those needs and on existing work on Learning by Design, this approach seems to be the most appropriate instructional framework for the development of this population of learners’ multiliteracies in Spanish.
Learning by Design
The Multiliteracies framework Learning by Design was first implemented in Australia in 2000 (Cope and Kalantzis 2015), and it has been subsequently applied to various projects in that country. The main premise guiding this approach is the idea that formal (i.e., academic) learning needs to integrate the “informal” learning (i.e., experiences) that permeates learners’ personal lives. Kalantzis and her colleagues (2005, 40) believe this is particularly important in today’s globalized and technology-based society, where “more is being learned in the domain of informal learning , and learners seem to be finding that domain more relevant and more engaging.” These researchers suggest that the traditional methods found in formal education (e.g., question-answering exchanges between instructors and students, multiple-choice activities, or traditional exams) do not reflect the kind of reality and learning that students experience in their everyday life. Thus, they propose the integration of both kinds of learning, formal and informal.
In order to achieve this goal, the point of departure is the need to develop curricula that, first of all, are based on relevant materials that connect closely to who the learners are—to their personal world, including the community to which they belong—by taking into account their diverse social and cultural backgrounds. This is what Kalantzis and her colleagues (2005) call belonging , which emphasizes the need for an instructional environment to which learners can connect at a deep, personal level and to which they feel they “belong.” Another important element in the kind of pedagogical model promoted by Learning by Design is learners’ depth of involvement and engagement in their learning process. That is, in order for learning to broaden learners’ knowledge in effective and life-long ways, it needs to result in a process of transformation (Kalantzis et al. 2005). For this transformation to take place, it is necessary to “take the learner into new and unfamiliar terrains. However, for learning to occur, the journey into the unfamiliar needs to stay with a zone of intelligibility and safety. At each step, it needs to travel just the right distance from the learner’s lifeworld starting point” (Ibid., 51).
Another important element in the Learning by Design approach is the process of learning itself. In the curriculum model developed by Kalantzis and Cope (2010, 2012), learning is interpreted as involving four knowledge processes —experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying, and “as a dynamic process of discovering form-meaning connections through the acts of interpreting and creating written, oral, visual, audiovisual, and digital texts” (Paesani et al. 2015, 23). These four processes of discovery mirror those that are present in informal learning , and in formal learning , they are embedded in instructional activities that allow learners to do the following: (1) experience known and new meanings (departing from known concepts and experiences and moving forward to explore new situations and/or information); (2) conceptualize meanings by naming (grouping into categories, classifying, defining) and with theory (formulating generalizations and establishing connections among concepts as well as developing theories); (3) analyze meanings functionally (focusing on structure and function, establishing logical connections) and critically (evaluating different perspectives, interests, and motives); and (4) apply meanings appropriately (engaging in real-life applications of knowledge) and creatively (applying new knowledge in innovative and creative ways) (Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 2012).
What transpires from the characterization of learning in Learning by Design presented in the previous three paragraphs is that, for learning to take place, it is important to develop a transformative curriculum , which will “[take] students from their lifeworld experiences [the point of departure] to deep [and new] knowledge, understandings and perspectives” (Bruce et al. 2015, 82). This type of curriculum will also have to be based on instructional materials that can guide learners through the four knowledge processes and expose them to what Serafini (2014) calls multimodal e...