What is Critical Literacy?

• "A rudimentary working definition of critical literacy entails three aspects. First, it involves a meta-knowleged of diverse meaning systems and the sociocultural context in which they are produced and embedded in everyday life.  By meta-knowledge I mean having an understanding of how knowledge, ideas and information "bits" are structured in different media and genres, and how these structures affect people's readings and uses of that information. Second, it inovles mastery of the technical and analytic skills with which to negotiatie those systems in diverse contexts.  This refers to how the pragmatics of use of literacy are translated into practice in different contexts.  Third, it inovles the capacity to understand how these systems and skills operate in relations and interest of power within and across social institutions." (p. 72)

                                                             -- Carmen Luke "Cyber-Schooling and Technological Change: Multiliteracies for new times" (pp. 69-91)

• "Third, there are no rules of correct usage.  The metalanguage of design that we presented in this chapter is more in the nature of a series of critical questions with which to locate variousts in meaning-form i relation to variation s in meaning-function.  This is not the kind of 'grammar" that you can get right and wrong.  Rather it is a grammar ta contrsts and accounts for different usages, not only between languages but withing what might otherwise be regarded as the one language--differences in meaning-making according to age, or gender, or regional origins, or ethinic background, or social class, or occupation, or fashion, or fetish...or whatever" (p.234)

                                                                                                                                 -- Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis "Designs for Social Futures" (pp. 203-234)

What is the Pedagogies of Multiliteracies?

 

• Literacy education that understands literacy as Multiliteracies. (p 234. Designs for Social Futures -- Cope and Kalantzis 2000)

• "First, Literacy is a matter of design or transformation ... Second, Literacy is in its nature multimodal...Third, there are no rules of correct usage." (p. 234)

• "Literacy is in its nature multimodal--a matter of visual as well as linguistic design.  And multimodality itself is becoming more significant in today's communications environment where, from multimedia desktops to shopping malls, written text is represented in a dynamic relation to sound, visuals, spaces and gesture.  Globalisation and local diversity also progressively transfer the balance of meaning away from language.  As a consequesnce, literacy teaching and learning need to be an increasingly interdisciplinary endeavour, in which the boundaries of literacy with art drama and music are no longer so clearly defined." (p. 234)

 

• Multimodal meaning is no more than the other modes of meaning working together.  And work together the always do.  Linguistic meanin in the form of speaking, for instance, is acheived in combination with audio meaning (prosody) as well as gestural meaning, not to mentiona spatial meaning.... Yet multimodal meaning is also much more than the sum of lingquistic, visual, spatial, gestural and audo modes of meaning.  It also involves porecesses of integration and moving the emphaiss backwards and forwards between the various modes.  At the heart of the processes of integration is the inherent "multiness" of human expression and perception, or synaesthesia." (p. 211)

 

• "The Multiliteracies Project aims to develop a pluralistic educational response to trends in the economic, civic and personal spheres of life which impact on meaning-making and therefore on literacy."  (p. 92)             --Joseph Lo Bianco "Multiliteracies and Multilingualism" (pp. 92-105)

 

 

• The Multiliteracies of digital electronic "texts" are based on notions of hybridity and intertextuality.  Meaning-making from the multiple linguistic, audio, and symbolic visual graphics of hypertext means that the cyberspace navigator must draw on a range of knowledges about traditional and newly blended genres or representational conventions, cultural and symbolic codes, as well as linguistically coded and software-driven meanings." (p. 73)     -- Carmen Luke "Cyber-Schooling and Technological Change: Multiliteracies for new times" (pp. 69-91)

 

            Literacy as design:

•      "Meaning-making involves Design in both its senses. "Design in the sense of morphology, that is structure and function, such as the design that "is" a motor car or a skeleton, for instance and design in the sense of an active, willed, human process in which we make and remake the conditions of our existence, that is, what designers do.  Design, therefore, refers both to structure and to agency." (p. 203 Cope and Kalantzis -- "Design for Social Futures")
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• • "Design is a process in which the individual and culture are inseparable.  The representational resources available to an individual are the stuff of culture; the ways of making meaning that an individual has learnt and used perennially over the course of their life; as well as those new ways of making meaning that they know are there and that they could pick up with more or less effort if and when they were needed.  Others' interets have already been expressed through Designings that have resulted in the Redesigned and these, in turn, become Available Designs for the individual in their own meaning-making.  Culture is no more and no less than the accumulated and continuing expression of agency; of Designing." (p. 203 Cope and Kalantzis -- "Design for Social Futures")