What is New in teaching Multiliteracies?

The New London Group, in A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, details a pedagogical theory for how to teach multiliteracies in which the mind, society, and learning are components to situate reform. Their goal is to have mastery in practice and they present four components that should be incorporated into a classroom setting to enrich learning of multiliteracies.
These four components resemble very much four steps of instruction constructed by Johann Friedrich Herbart, a philosopher of the mid-1800s. Herbart was a thinker who believed the mind was made up of presentations from the world. The mind worked on those presentations through a ‘threshold of conciousness’, as each idea battled for a spot to be related to another idea. Throughout the four steps students fluctuate between immersion and reflection to constantly keep the threshold active. His goal was to create a many-sided individual.

The four components in summary for each pedagogy (New London; Herbart:
Situated Practice: Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses, including those from the students' lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces.
Clearness: The student is framed in a position engulfed by ideas and presentations from experiences, encounters, and instruction. Student interest must be found in presentations and ideas.
Overt Instruction: Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding. In the
case of multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning.
Association: To situate the ideas into one’s own understanding or into greater knowledge, the teacher would scaffold or help associate ideas.
Critical Framing: Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular
Designs of meaning. This involves the students' standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context.
System: The student would make connections or links between various presentations of the branches of instruction and form a ‘circle of thought’. The equilibrium and disequilibrium found between each individual idea and link in the mind help form a system of understanding.
Transformed Practice: Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites.
Method: The student took this system and practiced it in the world. Student would practice with system created.


As I was reading this article, I kept thinking how much it sounded familiar, as I am doing a research project on Herbart due this week. So, are these pedagogical components presented by New London Group ‘new’? No and yes. Obviously we never really reinvent the wheel, but we may reinvent it for our purpose. Who knew that we would be able to see ideas from the 1800's fit in with those of the 21st century. Although the language in the New London components was posed for multiliteracies, I think Herbart’s was too. He wanted greater understanding of all experiences and subjects. He wanted students to be many-sided and not concentrate in one effort. Meaning making, or literacy was his goal as well. So once again, I think the old and new parallel quite well. The meaning is just in a new time and space, which is how something becomes new, really.