Available Designs
To what extent are students availing themselves of the gamut of “Available Designs”? If they are not doing so, what might be the main barriers?
In their landmark 1996 article “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”, The New London Group proposes that meaning-making happens by various designs and that all designs involve reworking of available designs. If we accept the premise–and most people have (Leander and Boldt (2013) as cited by Peña 2015), then the question of whether present-day learners are utilizing the full slate of available designs is a fair one. The answer, in my experience at the high school level, is no. I believe there are two reasons for this:
1) Many teachers are not comfortable allowing students to represent their learning using technologies they are not comfortable with.
2) Excessive curricular demands and the need to ‘cover’ all the outcomes leave most teachers falling back on multiple choice on assessments and learning activities that are the most time efficient.
Allowing learners to represent their learning outside of multiple choice assessments, lab reports and standard five paragraph essays requires teaching learners about various elements of design, some of which are represented by the New London Group’s diagram:
Since most high school teachers are specialists in a certain subject area, unless they are an art teacher, they are unlikely to have a background in these aspects of design. As someone who took part in a cross-grade Inquiry Program with 8th graders this year, I can tell you that without that background it is very difficult to offer the right feedback. It is easy to observe that the multi-media project a learner offers isn’t an effective representation of their learning–you know something isn’t right. It is another story to isolate what needs to be improved and articulate it in a way that an adolescent will respond positively. A lot of skills training goes in to giving a good presentation, and simply knowing how to make a Prezi doesn’t mean it will be a good representation of learning. My personal experience (this is really hard to think about and requires extra research outside school hours) and observation (most teachers will stick to the tried and true and skip the extra work/research) is that most of the available designs are not being taught, used and/or redesigned by students for the above mentioned reason.
When speaking about teachers not wanting to or not being able to do extra work or research to let students loose on the available designs, it cannot go without saying that many courses at the high school level have a quantity of learning objectives that does not allow for: the overt teaching of available designs, the drafting of students’ redesigns, the provision of formative assessment and the final presentations of the redesigns. In many courses there is barely enough time to cram in the outcomes with a monthly individual formative assessment. In British Columbia the government is in the process of streamlining the curriculum for more skills and deeper learning of fewer objectives (Government of British Columbia, 2015) but this is still in process and many teachers have a adopted a wait-and-see-approach.
While there are some teachers (about ten of thirty-five teachers at my school) encouraging students to use some of the available designs some of the time, I feel that the number will not grow much until the new curriculum is implemented. After the new curriculum comes into force, professional development that focusses on skill development (by teachers and learners) will be needed to make teachers more comfortable thus allowing students the freedom to explore and experiment with available designs. IF the curriculum and pro-d is done effectively, teachers newly freed from the demands of “covering” the curriculum, would be better positioned to provide the kind of constructive formative feedback students need to effectively represent their learning with their own re-designs.
But that is a big “if”.
References
BC Ministry of Education. (2015). Retrieved 5 August 2015, from http://www.bcedplan.ca/assets/pdf/bcs_education_plan_2015.pdf
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard educational review, 66(1), 60-93. Retrieved 5 August 2015, from http://wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/A_Pedagogy_of_Multiliteracies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm
Peńa, E. (2015). Blackboard Learn. Connect.ubc.ca. Retrieved 3 August 2015, from https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_63666_1&content_id=_2750952_1&framesetWrapped=true