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Wix Promotes Multiliteracies & Multimodality


The New London Group (NLG) first introduced the term "multiliteracies" following their infamous 1994 retreat in New London, New Hampshire in the subsequent, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. This manifesto was the result of ten scholars in the composition field (Cazden; Cope; Fairclough; Gee, Kalantzis; Kress; Luke; Luke; Michaels; Nakata) meeting to determine how to address new media and its place in teaching composition.

The NLG argued, "literacy pedagogy must now account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies" (p.61). They suggested that our understanding of literacy and how it is taught must expand from only alphabetic text to include digital tools and multimodal composition.

Joseph Harris furthers this argument and suggests that design is the key concept for teaching multiliteracies because "the task of the writer is to forge new meanings out of existing materials." A writer must move beyond the page for meaning and employ additional modes by including graphic art, audio clips, animated videos, still images, and web documents. Harris argues that a writer's real challenge is not to theorize about artifacts as the object of study, but to use these artifacts as the method of study. Harris suggests, "rather than looking within the self for meaning, the writer looks outward, to the culture around her; reworking and redesigning the texts and materials it has to offer her" (A Teaching Subject, pg. 171).

The writer as a designer and as a composer who employs multiliteracies and multiple modes needs platforms that can support this kind of meaning-making. I believe that Wix can be that platform. Composing in a digital platform like Wix allows students to consider choice and meaning within the rhetorical situation as they decide what to include to convey a particular message, to develop ideas in a non-linear, living space that is alive with sounds and movement, to think about how to connect their composition to the work of others, to build a composition that takes design and layout as a place for meaning, and it gives the students an audience that is greater than the classroom.

For more information on how students can benefit from using Wix, please visit my page on Digital Composition in the classroom.

Arola, Kristin L., Ball, Cheryl E., and Jennifer Sheppard. Writer/designer : A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2014. Print.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Utah: Utah State University Press, 2012. Print.

New London Group. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 60-92. Print.


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