From the outset, it’s interesting how Jennifer Powers’ Curriculum Theorizing for Multiliteracies:A Rebel with a Cause (The NERA Journal, 2006, 42(1), p. 14-18), frames multiliteracies within educational psychology’s socio-cultural approach through her mention of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky. Powers notes that education should “meet today’s students where they are, taking into account who they are and what learning methods they employ, are familiar with, need to try and enjoy” ( Powers 13). Recalling the Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Distance (ZPD) from last semester, educators and curriculums need not only to scaffold students' learning towards some end goal but also to meet students’ needs in a world that demands skills beyond the written text. Metaphorically, we shouldn’t ask students to take complete leaps of faith every day. Instead, we should “acknowledge, use, and foster the multiple literacies brought to the table by our students” (14). Quoting Maxine Green (2004), Powers warns against curriculums becoming “Crystal Palace of ideas” (14). This ‘ivory tower’ criticism echoes Damien Hirst’s insistence that art needs audiences discussed in my earlier Prezi post (17:53). So if art needs audiences, shouldn’t our curriculum be accessible to our clients/buyers/students?
However it’s interesting how Powers insists teachers’ “responsibility to use tools best suited to our students” that “are not necessarily limited to pen and paper any more” (14), when her two unit plan exemplars only minimally use technology tools to demonstrate student learning and skills. For instance, the “Playwriting 101: From Story to Stage” unit plan indeed asks students to transform the “written media and the short story format” into “three-dimensional meaning” of “sound, speech, and movement” through improv and rewriting assignments (16). However there is no use of technology and its still very much print focused. While the “Bob” of her childhood might not have to write a “decent five paragraph essay” (15) in her unit plan, I still found it hard to see how his excellent computer skills were given opportunity to shine in what was offered. Certainly, Powers(13) understands multiliteracies to be “the ability to encode or decode meaning in any of the forms of representation used in the culture to convey or express meaning” (quoting Eliot W. Eisner 1994). Therefore multiliteracies doesn’t merely mean using technology for technology’s sake but actually finding the proper tools for the tasks, students and learning goals.
But perhaps my criticisms aren’t so much the unit plans themselves but merely a result of the fact that the article was written in 2006? While just over half a decade old, things have radically changed within the fast moving context of technological innovation. Way back in 2006, YouTube was Time Magazine’s invention of the year and the first installment of the Did You Know? videos was in its inception. Facebook was going through its terrible 2’s and Wikipedia was only a 5 year old toddler. Even my beloved Prezi would have to wait 3 long years until its launch in April 2009.
But perhaps, I am missing the point entirely? Maybe Powers lack of technological specificity takes into account the rapid nature of technological innovations? If she had made reference to particular technologies in 2006, what certainty did she have that they’d still exist when her audience read her article subsequent? Perhaps they would have been made obsolete by our current ones. Who is to say our current web tools will still exist in the future? When’s the last thing you signed into your MySpace account? Did you even have one? Who is to say the next 6 years aren’t going to be as transformative or more so than the last 6? Therefore socio-cultural considerations dictates both what skills and knowledge students need to learn and the resources teachers have to teach those lessons.
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