Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. The Powers of Literacy : A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
Although this is a collection of essays reflecting on genre as an approach to teaching writing, the introduction, specifically the end of it, so thoroughly reads like a Berthovian methodology that as I was reading it I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t written by Berthoff. Clearly I need to read more Cope and Kalantzis. Did they read Berthoff? A superficial search indicates that Berthoff doesn’t show in their bibliographies (nor does any of her intellectual heritage, including Peirce). I wonder if I have time to reach out and contact them… ? Without reading their work more thoroughly? Beyond the NLG and Multiliteracies??? I feel like I’m running out of time.
oh hell… here is another dissertation topic… I can sense it… What might we make of the relationship between the ideas promoted by the NLG and Berthoff?
C & K belong to “the school of Education”…
Is a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (the NLG) a model OP? Do people use it? Probably. The question is… how do people use it?
What’s so interesting to me is C&K’s embrace of digital technologies and new media. They write about it (in the biographical info online and on their website) in such positive terms. I need more C&K…
But, from the intro to The Power of Literacy…
“By the early 1990s, progressivist pedagogy has developed well beyond Dewey’s avowed cultural and linguistic assimilation is and his notion that experiential literacy learning should always end with students learning standard English (Dewey, 1916). In fact, it has moved towards a relativistic theory of cultural and linguistic pluralism. This can be found in new institutional practices(principles of curriculum diversiftcation and school or teacher-based curriculum), in the theories of literacy mentioned above and most recently, in ‘postmodern’ and’poststructuralist’ theories of education (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989)” (Introduction, 14).
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