Since I will also be presenting this week, I'm going to follow in Timbre's footsteps and just discuss the Multiliteracies article here. So Gee is a member of the New London Group, yes? I was pleased to see the return of his Student's Bill of Rights in this week's reading, particularly as they expanded on what each of those ideas meant and I found my understanding of each principle being strengthened. That said, I will admit that while I'm beginning to get a handle on the how of literacy pedagogy, I find myself still very confused about the discussion of the what of literacy pedagogy.

If my understanding of what they presented as the Designs of Meaning is correct, they see Available Designs as the information that is already present, Designing as the process of using that information in the learning process and then the Redesigned as the transformed information. Is it just me or does that not sound like the how only in different language? Available Designs are the Critical Framing and Overt Instruction of the available knowledge/systems, Situated Practice is the Designing stage and Transforming knowledge is the last stage. Am I just oversimplifying here or missing something obvious? I suppose part of the explanation may be that they are saying look here is what multiliteracy pedagogy should look like and then this is how that looks in practice, but it all just seems needlessly complicated to me. I know Amy said we should be looking at not just the content of these articles but also how they are written and I'm stating that I found these the separation of the what and the how with different language to describe the same concepts kind of confusing.

Another aspect of the article that I found somewhat confusing was the introduction which talked about society's increasing privatization and the idea that "...market directed theories and practices , even though they sound humane, will never authentically include a vision of success and for all students." Only to go on and talk about how school's can redesign pedagogy to incorporate multiplicity and diversity and greater success for all students. It's not that I don't agree with their vision of what school's should do, I just don't understand how they got from their first conclusion into the rest of the article. Maybe I'm getting tied up in the practicalities when they're just talking about the theoretical and what should be and not what is, but I don't understand how we go from society has been steadily moving in this direction that favors students with access to schools can change the pedagogy of how we think of literacy so that every student has both access and engagement. I don't mean to be overly negative here because I know that just criticizing the system does nothing and that I'm hopefully playing a (small) part in actually making this vision of multimodal students a reality but it through me for a loop when they seemed to be going down the critical path only to suddenly jump in what to me feels like the opposite direction.

Sorry, I feel like I'm kind of all over the place with the article this week but hopefully you can make some sense of my rambling and I'm going to stop now.