Knowledge Societies: Learning for a Diverse World (original) (raw)
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Calico Journal, 2008
In this article we propose the pedagogical model bridging activities to address advanced foreign language proficiency in the context of existing and emerging Internet communication and information tools and communities. The article begins by establishing the need for language and genre-focused activities at the advanced level that attend to the shifting social practices and emerging literacies associated with digital media. Grounded in principles of language awareness and the concept of multiliteracies, the bridging activities model centers on guided exploration and analysis of student selected or created digital vernacular texts originating in Web 2.0 and other technologies/practices such as instant messaging and synchronous chat, blogs and wikis, remixing, and multiplayer online gaming. Application of the model includes an iterative implementation cycle of observation and collection, guided exploration and analysis, and creation and participation. In sum, the bridging activities approach is designed to enhance engagement and relevance through the incorporation of students’ digital-vernacular expertise, experience, and/or curiosity, coupled together with instructor guidance at the level of semiotic form including interactional features, discourse-level grammar, and genre. The ultimate goal is to foster critical awareness of the anatomy and functional organization of a wide range of communicative practices relating to both digital and conventional textual conventions.
In this article we propose the pedagogical model bridging activities to address advanced foreign language proficiency in the context of existing and emerging internet communication and information tools and communities. The article begins by establishing the need for language and genre-focused activities at the advanced level that attend to the shifting social practices and emerging literacies associated with digital media. Grounded in principles of language awareness and the concept of multiliteracies, the bridging activities model centers on guided exploration and analysis of student selected or created digital vernacular texts originating in Web 2.0 and other technologies/practices such as instant messaging and synchronous chat, blogs and wikis, remixing, and multiplayer online gaming. Application of the model includes an iterative implementation cycle of observation and collection, guided exploration and analysis, and creation and participation. In sum, the bridging activities approach is designed to enhance engagement and relevance through the incorporation of students’ digital-vernacular expertise, experience, and curiosity, coupled with instructor guidance at the level of semiotic form to explore interactional features, discourse-level grammar, and genre. The ultimate goal is to foster critical awareness of the anatomy and functional organization of a wide range of communicative practices relating to both digital and analogue textual conventions.
Harvard Educational Review A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures
In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment. (pp. 60-92) If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, one could say that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. Literacy pedagogy is expected to play a particularly important role in fulfilling this mission. Pedagogy is a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation. Literacy pedagogy has traditionally meant teaching and learning to read and write in page-bound, official, standard forms of the national language. Literacy pedagogy, in other words, has been a carefully restricted project-restricted to formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language. In this article, we attempt to broaden this understanding of literacy and literacy teaching and learning to include negotiating a multiplicity of discourses. We seek to highlight two principal aspects of this multiplicity. First, 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. As soon as our sights are set on the objective of creating the learning conditions for full social participation, the issue of differences becomes critically important. How do we ensure that differences of culture, language, and gender