Global Classroom
“A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” by the New London Group indicates the growing need for innovation in literacy pedagogy to meet the rapidly changing social environment. Indeed, the deepening cross-cultural and social diversity around the world now require us to address the notion of new social relationships with the necessary knowledge and skills to be “designer of our social futures,” while the existing curricula may have become irrelevant. They proposed the “multiliteracies” approach to creating a more balanced classroom design that includes situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice, which could bring new lights on learning in order to cope with “the flourishing of interrelated, multilayered, complementary yet increasingly divergent lifeworlds” facing us.
Diverse fields and disciplines in the globalizing world require students of this generation to acquire functional, critical, and rhetorical skills in addition to basic knowledge. Halliday suggested functions of “Available Designs” should include ideational, interpersonal, and textual aspects so that learners can be trained to be respectful of and sensitive to various perspectives and contexts. The idea of global classroom partnership, which involves educational collaboration and partnership connecting over 30 schools across regions and cultures, may shed light on delivery of enrichment and empowerment for learners worldwide. Given the international dimension of the project, students become participative and active contributors to their learning process. Harvard Professor Sandel created a similar project named global classroom, allowing learners from around the world to have a glimpse on current global public discourse. He held that disagreements should not correspond neatly to national boundaries; given that the range of participants is enlarged, he believed that the impact on learners’ character could be rich and subtle. He developed a technology called Spin, the product of the San Francisco-based startup Net Power & Light. “New technology”, he suggested, “takes the distance out of distance learning.” This perfectly complements the New London Group’s proposed multiplicity of discourses, taking into account the variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies.
Effectiveness of whether we can transform the achievable and apt outcomes of education could be measured by youth employment rate. McKinsey Consulting Company produced a report in 2012 stating that education to employment crisis is a stringent global issue in the 21st century. The report suggestions align with the key aims of the New London Group’s proposed literacy pedagogy to be more relevant to a new world of work, suggesting that skills shortages could be resolved through three critical intersections including enrolling, skills building and jobs finding. In order to bridge the gap between education and employment, policy makers and educators must constantly evaluate the success and alignment of the current pedagogy and hinder the process of adjustment so that it matches up with the current social environment. Engaging students in real world problems and activities, the dynamic of education is constantly changing with information overflow. It’s thus highly necessary to cultivate students with the relevant skillsets and professional talents suited for their social futures and prospective career paths. This requires the minute, deskilled components of labor to be replaced with “multiskilled,” well-rounded workers who are flexible enough to be able to do complex and integrated work (Cope & Kalantzis, 1995).
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References:
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An international journal, 4(3), 164-195.
The Global Classroom. Retrieved from http://naeglobalclassroom.nordanglia.com/
Photo retrieved from http://xue.youdao.com/zx/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/071008-pic.jpg
Online communications and collaboration are making the classroom truly global. Multiliteracies give educators not only more tools to use in the classrooms, but more focused ones to achieve success for many different situations that have a growing list requirements. What really excites me about online education, and online learning is we are starting now to truly build a global classroom. The more we learn, learn about each other, and ourselves the farther we can move forward as a total world population. We are living in a time right now where these connections between classrooms around the world are happening slowly, but will really start increasing with more and more remote communities start coming online as the Internet reaches them. It will be fascinating to find out where the global classroom goes next.