Rationale and Design of Lesson
Why Multiliteracies?
Knowledge about multiliteracies is important, since it can create conditions for critical understanding of the discourses of work and power. This kind of knowledge help establish newer, more productive and genuinely more egalitarian working conditions (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Multiliteracies are also necessary in engaging and captivating the highly diverse new generation.
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The fundamental goal of multiliteracies is to create conditions for learning in the massively plural society. There are deep falsifications and fabrications of command society regime of mass production and uniform mass consumption, ‘one people, one state’ nationalism and pretensions to cultural homogeneity of the old mass media and mass culture. Therefore, we need to help students get comfortable with themselves and gain the flexibility to collaborate and negotiate with others to forge common interests (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Eventually, we transform students into active designers of meaning who are not just skillful and competent but also open to innovation, changes and differences.
Grammar of Visual Design
The three aforementioned lessons are centralized around the principles of Grammar for Visual Design, with emphases on the following aspects:
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Composition - Organization and position of objects to determine interactions and relative importance (relative size, colour & contrast, foregrounding & focus)
Perspective - direction of sight/how close or far viewer is positioned affecting his/her relationship with visual elements
Visual Symbols - representing ideas conventionalized through use in sociocultural contexts
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Categorized accordingly into the groups ‘Encounter’, ‘Engagement’, ‘Evaluation’, some important specialized metalanguage developed for intricate interpretation and analysis of visual texts are featured in the following chart on the right (Halliday, 1978):
'Learning by Design' Framework
According to the Learning by Design framework, learning has become a consequence of a series of knowledge actions, using multimodal media to externalize our thinking. A range of pedagogical moves should be employed in a lesson featuring a pedagogy of multiliteracies, involving not only ‘situated practice’ and ‘overt instruction’, but also ‘critical framing’ and ‘transformed practice’ (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009).
Analytical Perspectives
Students will have been primarily employing the following perspectives when participating in the lessons planned by the teacher (Serafini, 2011):
Emerging Forms of Engagement
It becomes crucial for teachers to include transmedia teaching today due to the emergence of new types of engagements, ranging from press releases and gossip news to interviews and investigation websites. Each platform carries a different type of story engagement with new opportunities and nuances to learn about the main story world (McIntyre, n.d.).
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Instead of getting students to become merely passive consumers of media resources, the teacher engages students in transmedia culture to access the story from multiple entry points. Students then assume active roles by filling gaps for themselves (McIntyre, n.d.). As dictated by collective intelligence, the more students interact with different transmedia elements of the larger narrative, the more they're rewarded with a richer understanding of the story world. This justifies the intentional integration of contemporary participatory cultural practice with active audience participation, accompanied by the use of digital technologies (McIntyre, n.d.).