Concept of Multimodality

A comparative reading between the “Multiliteracies: The Beginnings of an Idea” by Bill Cope & Mary Kalantzis and their writings for the New London Group’s book Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, allows us to extrapolate the pedagogical implications put forth by all the texts. All the readings ground their work in Multimodality. However, where Kress and Van Leeuwen put forth and define the concepts that form the theory of multimodal literacy, Cope and Kalantzis expound as to the social impact multimodality must have when constructing pedagogies for future generations.
The New London Group, along with Cope and Kalantzis, center their articles on the pedagogical implications for validating message carriers other than the commonly valorized written word. They wrestle with the concept of the “lifeworld” in the selection, “A Pedagogy for Multiliteracies,” essentially renaming discursive fields in Bordeaux fashion, which overlap and rely on shared concepts of how to communicate and what type of semiosis is valuable. Their premise is that lifeworlds, or migrating discursive spheres, overlap and exemplify diversity alongside multimodality and should be incorporated when designing pedagogies for the social future. Additionally, Cope and Kalantsiz address a social transaction that occurs between teacher and student. Each multimodal/multitextual construction is reliant on three tenets of the meaning-making process. First, student practitioners must incorporate the idea of social practice, which requires the designer/writer to recognize lifeworlds, public realms, and workplace dynamics. Second, all multiliteracy designers must practice overt instruction, or the use of a metalanguage that addresses the social, cultural and technical implication attached to the utilization of specific communicative modes. Lastly, students, as designers, should come to realize that each multimodal construction foments in social futures, which account for diversified context, and the emergent text forms that are associated with newly developing information technologies.
Additionally, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis write about multimodality and the implications it will have on communications. In “Designing for Social Futures,” an article they wrote for the New London Group. They discuss multimodality and prognosticate on the future of literacy pedagogies. In it, they call for a change in pedagogy that is, “not defined exclusively in economic terms and that have embedded within it a critique of hierarchy and economic injustice.” (p. 13) Additionally, Cope and Kalantzis argue that due to globalization of communications and labor markets, “mere literacy” is no longer sufficient. There is need for a multimodal literacy pedagogy, which deals with diversity and hierarchies, one that recognizes difference according to culture and context, specific cognition and the resultant social effects.
Additionally, and I feel of great import is their reference to Husserl’s warnings regarding the “seductive nature of language.” This notion is strikingly similar to Stuart Hall’s prospicient warning for academicians not to become part of the “theory elite.” He warns that becoming grounded in one theory, which will undoubtedly be based in part upon other theories, is akin to valorizing one mode of communication over another.
They note that because the word and the written text is the most commonly used and thus often the most revered mode of communication, there is tendency to withhold credence for multimodality and convergent media as valid forms of actualizing semiotic intent. The tendency of current literacy pedagogies to disregard orality as an aboriginal form of communication is a culturally imperialistic practice they ask designers of future pedagogies to keep in mind. By utilizing the concepts of multimodality, Cope and Kalantzis, alonglside the scholars of the New London Group, aim to create new pedagogies that are alternatives, yet equally adept message carries that can work in conjunction with the highly valued written text. Cope and Kalantzis increasingly complicate the issue by bringing to the fore the notion that communicative forms, in an ever-digital world, are divesting themselves from the top-down temporal messaging of the page, to the hypertextual environment where the user dictates his or her own reading paths. They argue that it is not until multimodality in practice is recognized as viable progenitor of message carriers, that future pedagogy, which requires the combination of social awareness with the increasingly hypertextual environment, will continually be ill equipped to address the needs of its students. Their future pedagogical constructs aim to incorporate multimodality as a means of articulating semiotic intent that accommodates the vast number of communicative practices by finding the most appropriate mode(s) for “transduction,” in hopes to reduce “transformation.”
Cope and Kalantzis, writing from the knowledgeable position with regard to multimodality, push forward as to how the processes of design, production, and distribution amount to more than simple “transduction” or “transcoding” between varying mediums and modes. They argue that the understanding of multimodality as a valid literacy theory requires the acknowledgment that we as communicative beings leave nothing untouched. Every semiotic event from speaking to carving “transforms” every aspect of the communicative process through the additive effect of usage of semiotic tools, both as modes and within varying contexts. Much like the Bahktinian idea that all linguistic utterance builds a contextual history of the referent, the “experiential meaning potential” introduced by Kress and Van Leeuwen regards the historical usage of a message carrier and the current context in which that message carrier is being used. There will never be stagnation in literacy because of contextualized historicity. Cope and Kalantzis ask, “What does this transformation conflagration of locating a viable message carrier mean when complicated by the hypertextual environment?”

Works Cited
Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routlegde, 2000.