multiple literacies - reading and righting?

I went off on a quest to try and define terms like; language, reading, literacy, multiple literacies, discourse and traced the coining of the term “multiliteracies” to this 1996 Harvard Education Review.

http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/290

an unprotected copy of the work is at:

http://wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/A_Pedagogy_of_Multiliteracies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm#11

According to both Wikipedia and the authors of the review itself, mulitliteracies was coined here.
From the abstract we read, “a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies."”

Discourse is described and defined. It presents many of the ways our CU program as been prompting us to think about language, literacy and culture.

HOWEVER when I get to the bottom of the article and try to figure out what they are suggesting in terms of what it would mean for the classroom – I’m lost. This is in spite of such promising topic headings as “What Schools Do and What We Can Do in Schools”.

There’s a very appealing view of multiliteracies as including more than print, it includes digital media, hyperlinks, multimedia and such. That’s something I can grasp. Literacy as print in many other forms and extended forms makes good sense.

What they seem to be calling for schools to do is to constantly design delivery of instruction to leverage cultural resources in our classroom.

Good grief. That image is fine if you give me a few hours of prep for every hour of class. I’m schooled in design. Engineers design, however, they also implement. At some point the design is frozen and the product built. Design is time consuming and error prone. In a real classroom with real constraints of time and numbers of students I mostly need to implement.

What’s possible within economic limits?
Much of what we study is focused on the maximum we can do for our students. How high can we set our expectations? What would we possible for every student under optimal conditions.

How about some focus on the floor as well as the ceiling? What are the minimum mandatory expectations we should have for a student – what are the public school exit criteria? Not the entry into MIT criteria – but the minimum madatories.

How about knowing how to read and write English?
Want to make that English or some other languages too? It’s ok with me from an educational standpoint, but I think that question is beyond the scope of an educational stand. It’s a political question. Educators can be part of the discourse, but not the final decision makers.

If a student meets the minimum mandatory requirements, let’s say, reading and writing English, then let’s look at where we can go beyond that – let us then think about getting the student ready for Stanford or MIT.