Designing social futures

Blog. Diary.
E-news. Newspapers.
E-mails. Letters by post.
MMORPGs. Board games.
E-learning. Chalk-and-board lessons.

The first words are all coined recently, due to the emergence of the IT era. There is a transition from how people used to keep diaries, read newspapers, send snail mail and playing board games to the present day where many people prefer blogging, read their news online, send e-mails and play MMORPGs. Even in schools, there is the infusion of e-learning.

The world is evolving and no longer the same as before. Working lives have changed. It is no longer repetitive, unskilled work but rather it now involves workers who are multi-skilled, all-roundered and can do complex and integrated work. Society is changing alongside with working lives too. There is much hype on diversity, recognizing that there are differences in everyone. Everyone identifies themselves differently, such as members belonging to the various groups of communities and the languages they speak. Like a ripple effect, it is affecting personal lives are thus changing too. Personal space and privacy is diminishing and being made public due to media. Communities once drawing clear boundaries are now overlapping, resulting is boundaries blurring. People are now in multilayered lifeworlds.

All these, have implications on us teachers – how we teach and what we teach. As teachers, we have to account for the culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies. There is a multiplicity of discourses. We also have to take note that there is a huge range of text forms which presents information to us and the important role of multimedia technologies in our present lives.

Design, according to NLG, is driven by the metalanguage of Multiliteracies. Design of the classroom processes such as, materials, pedagogy, curricular and classroom will affect the results in learning. Design is also made up of three components, namely, available designs, designing and the redesigned to reinforce that meaning-making has to be an active and dynamic process. Available designs are what the world gives or has, in terms of its materials, genre and resources. It provides the resources for meaning. Designing, a semiotic activity, takes the meaning from available designs and then transforming, involving re-articulation and recombination of available resources, into new ways of viewing or presenting it. The result of Designing leads to new meaning, a new resource which is a new Available Design.

This has an effect on us teachers, in a way that there is a necessity for a language to talk about language, images, texts and meaning-making interactions. Due to the huge range of texts available in this present age, visual and textual, available through the media and electronically, language must be able to describe meaning in these various domains. Meaning making is multi-modal, involving various design elements such as audio, spatial, visual, linguistic and gestural design. Hybridity and intertextuality help to make multimodal meaning as texts these days involves many elements, such as the visual aspect and inter-relatedness of texts. As teachers, we therefore have to design our lessons to suit this versatility of language.

As such, in order to design such lessons, we also have to understand how the human mind works, which is embedded in social, cultural and material contexts. There are four factors to consider when planning the lesson.
Situated practice – providing an authentic purpose to learning, tapping on student’s schema and prior knowledge
Overt instruction – active interventions from the teacher, scaffolding and collaborative learning activities to achieve awareness and control of what is being learnt
Critical framing – denaturalize and make strange again what students have learnt
Transformed practice – Redesigned and applying to other contexts

In Singapore’s context, there is a heavy commitment to multilingualism and multiculturalism. In our classrooms, we have to consider that our students come from diverse backgrounds. To some, English might not be their first language. There is also an increasing number of foreign students in our classrooms. Teachers have to therefore, bear in mind the different and diverse backgrounds they have and the experiences they carry with them.

Singapore is also a society that runs on people-power and technology. Singapore also has a highly information-based economy. With this mindset, we teachers would want to prepare our students for this society. We want to equip our students with skills, especially in information technology. Schools are organizing computer workshops to train students in IT skills.

During my practicum, I attempted a lesson, infusing IT, where the students, in groups are required to search for information from the World Wide Web and then present the information on a piece of butcher paper. In order to ensure that students have obtained information from reliable sites, I shortlisted a few websites for them to use. The rationale behind his lesson is to infuse IT into the lesson through overt instruction, by providing scaffolding and active interventions. I was also trying to introduce the different elements of design, by setting the presentation of information in the form of a poster, a hybrid of design elements and genre.

With multiliteracy pedagogies, the classroom lies in the hands of the teachers, exploiting the use of the various resources to make lessons come alive and authentic for the students. Gone are the days where by it is chalk-and-talk. These days, IT is seeping at a rapid rate into our classrooms. Teachers use PowerPoint to prepare for lessons and this in itself, involves various elements of design, such as visual, linguistic and audio.