What is Multiliteracies?

Hello, welcome to Multi-Mix, a podcast about multilateracies. I'm Liam Anderson and I'm going to be your host for this show. I'm here with William DeHurter, who is the assistant director of the Michigan Tech Multilateracies. Hi, I'm also the assistant for this podcast. Yeah, he's my crony for this short, short while. Yeah, we're going to be talking about what multilateracies is today, and we're going to be giving you a little rundown of what that word means and what kind of things you can do in the center as well. So stay tuned for some fun facts about that. All right, for this week we'll be drawing primarily from a book titled Multilateracies, Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. It's by the New London Group. It's edited by Bill Cope and Mary Colantis. It may help to think of multilateracies as communication that accounts for different cultures, disciplines, and methods of expression, including written, visual and spoken forms. So Liam, what do you think multilateracies means? Let's see, multi is many. Literacies is ways of communicating or reading and writing usually. And so that, but I think the key part of this is that there's the two plurals. So we have literacies, which are multiple ways of reading and writing. And I'm sure that you'll explain what exactly that entails to me in a bit. But before that, we have multi. So that means that we must have multiple categories of ways of reading and writing. Sure, yeah. So it's not multi literacy. It's not literacy is it's multi literacies. It's the distinction that we have to pick apart here. All right, so let's explain that. Well, multi literacy theory proposes that all communicators develop different reading and writing skills for different parts of their lives. Right. People typically speak differently to their friends than they do their co-workers or their authority figures. The new London group tells us that these differences in communication are markers of different life worlds. That's kind of a scary term. It's a, it's a philosophy term. Life worlds are just like it's your horizon of experience. Right. There's spheres of existence. A person might have a working life, a public life or a personal life. And these different spheres require different reading and writing skills to communicate effectively. As the London group phrases it. So this is a direct quote from page 17. We have to be proficient as we negotiate the many life worlds. Each of us inhabits and the many life worlds we encounter in our everyday lives. So thinking about this term life world, as you said, it's kind of a philosophical word with a lot of a lot of weight behind it sometimes. What can you give like an example of maybe what what isn't isn't a life world? All right. So if I'm going to try to essentialize what a life world is, it's just, it's your unexamined existence. Right. So my dog is living the life world of a dog, but it's not thinking to itself, I'm a dog. You aren't sitting there thinking to yourself, I'm a college student. I am now. Yeah, you are now. But you know, that's where you're just sitting and you feel like things are normal. That's your life world. And so it sounds to me like this is a concept that you really can't fully summarize in a little 10 second sentence. Well, it's more complicated than that. Well, I'm not an expert on this for sure. I think there was some philosophers coming out of the Frankfurt School that dealt with it a lot more intensely. And to me, it seems like the new London group took this idea of life world. And they wanted to change it because life world originally is just like, yep, you have your spirit of existence. That's it. And then the new London group is like, no, let's break it down into multiple spheres of existence because we have different personas and different methods of communication that we apply for different facets of our lives. And so that's when they broke it down into this idea of a professional life, a public life and a personal life. Okay, so if I wanted to really simplify it, I could say something along the lines of all of these spheres of existence or just the different kind of contexts in which you communicate. Yeah, it's in a marker for it is like that things are tacit that things are unspoken in the way that you're communicating with another person. Okay, right. And as those those those tacit uses of language or uses of register or tone or whatever the markers are change. And it's all unspoken. That means that you're shifting into a different sphere according to the new London group. Okay, that makes sense. As we all learned pretty early, I think successful writing is contingent on audience and context those change constantly. Multiliteracy is allows us to think a little more deeply about how exactly those two forces influence our communication. We all write, read and speak differently according to our relationship with our audience. We reconstruct and renegotiate our identities as become more adept at traversing the various speech and discourse communities in our lives. In many cases, these negotiations between skills produce multimodal compositions. Multimodal compositions are projects that incorporate multiple modes of communication simultaneously. The new London group suggests five different modes of communication, linguistic, visual, gestural, spatial, and audio. Multimodal writing finds advantages in combining architecture, sound, video and text. A multimodal writer might choose to film a video of themselves explaining a certain concept to improve the effectiveness of their message. How the camera shot is framed, the colors used, the speaker's body language and speech, what the room looks like, and what text may appear on the screen are all modal elements that mesh to support the communicative act in some way. So would you say it sounds by your description that this is a lot like an art form that you're thinking a lot about the way different things. So you could say speech and text go together just like red and blue do in a painting. Yeah, I mean, that's one interesting way to put it. It's sort of a rhetorical act. And I believe rhetoric has historically been identified as half science and half art, right? So you try to find ways to scientifically pick apart what works and what doesn't. But at the end of the day, you still have to have a little bit of an artistic sensibility to make it work. So that sounds to me like that puts that puts rhetoric and multi literacies and kind of a unique place between science and art because you can quantify and study a fair amount of it just by what how people react to it and how people do it. But there's also a lot that's left kind of up in the air that's all subjective and you kind of go by feel with it. Yeah, so a lot of it is like how deeply do you understand your audience? How deeply do you understand the forces that are influencing this communication? A deeper understanding of those things allows you to apply certain decisions on to the communicative act that you're molding, right? If I understand that this person isn't going to understand this word that I want to use, I'm going to either use a different word or try to introduce that word to them. Or if I understand that I want to give this idea across to this community, oh, they usually communicate in this genre with this particular set of features, I'm going to have to learn those features and then apply what I want to say into that sort of ready made box of that genre. Okay, so a lot of it ends up just being translation from your language to your same language but to different people. So English to English for an engineer maybe. Yeah, you might call it translation, you might also call it code mashing in some cases where you're just trying to take this experience and make it understood in this for this community. Or take this set of language and introduce it to this community that doesn't know it. Okay, so how does this all fit into the way the multilateracy center runs? Well, in our center coaches help writers navigate the expectations of different discourse communities, speech communities and cultures and their personal professional academic lives, their life worlds. This is primarily achieved through working with writers to understand differences in speech communities, discourse communities, context and genre conventions. It's a subtle but important distinction to say that we do not administer knowledge to writers, but we work with them to understand the boundary features between different communicative forms and situations. One might a video resume be rhetorically advantageous. What does this particular comment from this instructor mean? What are the unspoken expectations of this writing situation? So would you say writing situations or something that overlap and that you run into multiple at once? And do you think that that's something that we end up dealing with subconsciously? Or do you think that it's something that we do have to actively learn and be conscious of? So in terms of like it being subconscious, I would say the word that is used is the word tacit, which means that we aren't we aren't externalizing it to another person as we're doing it. doing it necessarily. We may know these things, we may pick up on these patterns, but we may not realize what they are. You can pick a bookshelf over here, or some books on it. You can pick any book off that bookshelf. I guarantee you that there are going to be a set of conventions applied to it. The first page will always be on the right. The margins will always be at least a half inch. The letting in between the lines of text will always be two points higher than the actual font size. You can pick any type of writing, and there is going to be some conventions around it. Those conventions usually come out of just the active replicating this type of communication over and over and over again. That process is called tickification. Because you mentioned that all of these understandings tend to be tacit, do you think that we can become better communicators by consciously understanding these contexts that we're speaking in? Oh for sure, definitely. As a matter of fact, it's not until you realize where these boundaries are that you can get really good at not only replicating those documents in that particular way, given those boundaries, but also rhetorically deciding when those boundaries aren't suitable for what you want to do, then you want to push them and you want to make an anti-genre move and make your document look a little bit different to achieve some sort of effect. Okay, so to quote Bill Waterson, "You've got to know the rules pretty well to break every single one." There you go. Okay. All right. Well, I hope you understand a lot more about multi-literacies than you did before you started listening. And tune in next time for we're going to be talking about some more changes of convention. I'm going to be talking about some medical language laws in Britain, which I know doesn't sound all that exciting, but trust me, we'll make it cool. See you later. This has been Multimix. Multimix is recorded and edited by Liam Anderson. This episode's script was written by multilateracy Center Assistant Director William DeHurter.