Week 7 Blog Post - Oct 1

This week’s readings:

New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review. 66.1(1996): 1-32.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, 2011. (read through pg 82)

Shipka and NLG have a good number of similarities in that they both argue for an expanded view of literacy. For both sets of authors, literacy must be expanded to LITERACIES but, for NLG this focus tends to focus almost solely on digital literacies and their impacts on various elements of society while Shipka urges us to be wary of focusing only on digital literacies.

Shipka argues that composing is never really monomodal but is, instead, always some sort of a multimodal creation. While she is clearly in favor of multimodal work, though, Shipka is “concerned that emphasis placed on “new (meaning digital) technologies has led to a tendency to equate terms like multimodal, intertextual, multimedia, or still more broadly speaking, composition with the production and consumption of computer-based, digitized, screen-mediated texts. [She is]…concerned as well that this conflation could limit…the kinds of texts students produce in our courses” (pp.7-8). For Shipka, focusing only on the written text or on the digital text is limiting to student growth and it should only be one of several foci of the FYC class. “in addition to examining writing as ‘the thing,’ meaning final products that may be entirely or even partially comprised of alphabetic text, we need to investigate the various kinds of writing that occur around – and surround – writing-as-the-thing” (p.82)

I find Shipka’s argument to be very persuasive. In many instances in our own lives, writing is often a tool as a means to an end rather than always as THE end product. After reading Shipka’s argument, I find myself rethinking the overall structure of my classroom. Presently, the class is structured by a series of traditional and multimodal assignments that ultimately result in a researched argument essay. Perhaps I should structure the class in a sort of reverse organization to assist students in achieving their own goals like Shipka’s Muffy (I never could really get over that name in the reading).

Like Shipka, the NLG focuses their arguments around the notion of multiliteracies but, unlike Shipka, they tend to discuss digital literacies. The NLG argues that our views of literacy must evolve with the multiplicity of discourses that currently exist and that constantly seem to appear in our culture and in worldwide cultures. For me, the NLG primarily argues that “such a view of language will characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy. A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects” (p.4).

This is my second time reading this NLG piece and, for whatever reason, it made much more sense to me this time. I think that pairing it with Shipka made it much more accessible and the concepts made way more sense. I do, though, find the NLG a bit frustrating since their “manifesto” is deemed a “tentative starting point for that process” (p. 28); whereas Shipka’s argument is a bit more decisive.

Overall, I would agree with some of the other blog posts that put NLG at the center of the multimodal timeline discussion. Their 1996 discussion was relatively early in the game and it is, most certainly, a seminal text in the discussion of multiliteracies. Shipka’s text seems like a 2011 text to me. It is clearly influenced by the Lauer and Wysocki’s pieces that discuss naming issues since she specifically discusses the dangers of labeling specific literacies. Her text was also influenced by Selfe and Selfe and Hawisher who suggest that we must be cognizant of simply using technology for the sake of technology’s existence.