From Designing to Organizing New Social Futures: Multiliteracies Pedagogies for Today

Abstract

More than 20 years ago, literacy pedagogies informed by the emerging networked world defined by local diversity and global connectedness, new digital media and fast capitalism. Modern people now fully inhabit the world they described, but the contours of that world’s racial dynamics and growing inequality call for a refinement of pedagogies that embrace a more activist metaphor than that of design. Our pedagogies of multiliteracies must now embrace the ‘organizing of social futures’ in ways that apprentice young people to repertoires of collective action, in which literacy becomes more fully a means of supporting community efforts to promote and bring about more just futures.

Additional Resources

1. Composing Our World

   http://composeourworld.org/blog/about/

   The aim of this project is to develop a year-long English language arts curriculum that is civically engaged, project-based, and inclusive. The project is making use of digital projects that help build students’ sense of agency in their local communities and the broader world for using, remixing, and designing multimedia products for real audiences.

2. Critical Civic Inquiry

   http://www.criticalcivicinquiry.net/what-is-cci/

   A legacy web site with materials from an action civics project that engaged youth in critical inquiry into conditions of their schools and communities.

3. Teach Youth Radio

   https://youthradio.org/for-teachers/

   A resource that makes powerful critical media production pedagogies of Youth Radio accessible to teachers.

Notes

¹ Both of us were students of two members of the NLG, Jim Gee and Sarah Michaels, and are among those influenced by their work.