A Journey
Curriculum for Cultural Diversity
We started working in the late 1970s the new fields of English as a Second Language and multicultural education in Australia. We felt uncomfortable with the first wave of multicultural initiatives, which we believed to be tokenistic. We encountered a curriculum which remained substantially unchanged, despite the sprinkling of national day festivals and curriculum units which presented a tourist-postcard view of ‘other countries and cultures’. We thought this ‘spaghetti and polka’ approach to diversity amongst learners created as many new problems as it solved old ones. The key, we felt, was a more foundational approach in which every learner was encouraged to consider the role of culture and diversity in their own lives. The result was a large curriculum research and development project funded by the Commonwealth Schools Commission and sponsored by the Catholic Education Office in Sydney, the ‘Social Literacy Project’. The main focus of Social Literacy was concept formation and integrated approaches to learner diversity, language learning and multidisciplinary problem solving. At this time we also authored a number of academic publications reporting on our research and articulating a theory of transformative multicultural education.
References
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, An Overview: Teaching/Learning Social Literacy, Common Ground, Sydney, 1989.
Kalantzis, Mary, Bill Cope, Greg Noble and Scott Poynting, Cultures of Schooling: Pedagogies for Cultural Difference and Social Access, The Falmer Press, London, 1991. | link
Kalantzis, Mary, Bill Cope and Diana Slade, Minority Languages and Dominant Culture: Issues of Education, Assessment and Social Equity, The Falmer Press, London, 1989. | link
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘White Noise: The Attack on Political Correctness and the Struggle for the Western Canon’, Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, Vol.28, No.4, 1997, pp.283-329. | download
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, ‘Multicultural Education: Transforming the Mainstream’, in Stephen May (ed.), Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education, Falmer Press, London, 1999, pp.245-276.
Literacy
From the mid 1980s, we began to work in the field of literacy, taking up positions at the Centre for Multicultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. We became concerned that the newer approaches, such as whole language and process writing, seemed to work well for middle class, first language speakers of the dominant national language but did not necessarily work so well for children from poorer families and those who did not speak that language at home. Out of this arose the ‘genre’ approach to literacy, which aimed to engage learners explicitly with the languages of success at school and social power, using a functional linguistic approach in which linked textual conventions to their social purposes. A year in 1990-1991 for Mary on a Fulbright award at Keene State College in the University of New Hampshire and for Bill a Visiting Fellow position at Harvard, broadened our understanding of the politics of diversity in education and international debates about literacy.
In the mid nineties, this work evolved into the ‘Multiliteracies’ theory of contemporary literacy. By then, we had moved to James Cook University of North Queensland. Along with several of the ‘genre’ theorists, in 1994 we brought together a group of the world’s leading literacy educators for a week in the small town of New London, New Hampshire. Here, this group (which later became know as the ‘New London Group’) coined the term ‘Multiliteracies’ and began a collaboration which culminated in publication of an article of the same name in the 1996 Harvard Educational Review and 2000 book. We added two ‘multis’ to the literacy agenda: multimodality, or the increasing convergence of visual, audio, gestural and spatial modes of meaning in the new communications environment; and multilingualism, not just in the sense in which global forces expose us more intimately to different languages in our everyday and educational settings, but also in the sense that social languages (dialects, registers, peer discourses, strands in popular culture, and specialist discourses of profession, technology and interest) were becoming more different to each other even within a language like global English. As a consequence, navigating the world of meaning was more a matter of crossing boundaries between different discourse communities than learning the rules of a ‘standard’ language. The only rule was that there are no rules except those of a finely situated ‘social language’, and that negotiating language differences was more important than thinking you could get language ‘right’.
References
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis (eds), The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing, Falmer Press, London, and University of Pittsburgh Press, Pennsylvania, 1993, 286pp. | link
The New London Group (Cazden, Courtney, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis et al.), ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures’, Harvard Educational Review, Vol.66, No.1, Spring 1996, pp.60-92. | download
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis (eds), Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, Routledge, London, 2000, 350pp. | link
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope (eds), Transformations in Language and Learning: Perspectives on Multiliteracies, Common Ground, Melbourne, 2001, 152pp. | link
Kalantzis, Mary, Gella Varnarva-Skoura and Bill Cope (eds), Learning for the Future: New Worlds, New Literacies, New Learning, New People, Common Ground, Melbourne, 2002, 255pp. | link
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, ‘Language Education and Multiliteracies’, in Stephen May and Nancy H. Hornberger (Eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Vol. 1, Springer, 2008, pp.195-211. | download
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘Multiliteracies: New Literacies, New Learning’, forthcoming in Pedagogies: An International Journal. | download
Civic Pluralism and Australian Multiculturalism
One of our abiding concerns has been the nature of cultural and social diversity and the implications of this diversity for schools. We also became interested in changes in the nature of citizenship in a world where the nation state was becoming a less significant locus of power and identity. In 1995, Bill took up the position of Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and a Division Head in the Australian Government’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, charged with developing and implementing policies for one of the most diverse countries on earth (forty-one per cent of the population has at least one parent not born in Australia; two and a half per cent of the population is Indigenous). There, he developed the Charter of Public Service in a Culturally Diverse Society, subsequently taken up as guiding principles at all three levels of government in Australia.
References
Castles, Stephen, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis and Michael Morrissey, Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia, Pluto Press, Sydney and London, 1988. Second edition, 1990. Third edition, 1992. | link
Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Charter of Public Service in a Culturally Diverse Society, DIMA, Canberra, 1998.
Cope, Bill, ‘The Language of Forgetting: A Short History of the Word’, RePublica, Issue 2, 1995. Reprinted with minor revisions in Fraser, Morag (ed.) Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998, pp.192-223. | download
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, A Place in the Sun: Re-creating the Australian Way of Life, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2000, 385pp. | link
Kalantzis, Mary, ‘Australia Fair: Realities and Banalities of Nation in the Howard Era’, Overland, No.178, 2005, pp.5-21. | download
Workplace Cultures
In 1991, we established the Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney, a research and development centre. Here, we became involved in research into the language of the new workplace, and, more generally, thinking through changes in the nature of work engendered by new technologies, new systems of management and globalisation. We also got involved in developing national competency frameworks that link education and work. Download CWCC Project List.
References
Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis, Anne Pauwells, Diana Slade and Daphne Brosnan, Local Diversity, Global Connections. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1994. Volume 1: Six Approaches to Cross-cultural Training—A Report, 101pp; Core Principles for Effective Cross-cultural Training—A Training Manual, 69pp.
Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis, Allan Luke, Bob Morgan, Rob McCormack, Nicky Solomon, Diana Slade, and Nancy Veal, The National Framework of Adult Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence, Australian Committee for Training and Curriculum, Melbourne, 1993, 80pp.
Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis, Joseph Lo Bianco, Andrew Lohrey, Allan Luke, Michael Singh and Nicky Solomon ‘Cultural Understandings’ as the Eighth Key Competency, Queensland Department of Education, 1994, 44pp.
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, Productive Diversity, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1997. | link
Kalantzis, Mary, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians: “Knowledge Management” and “Learning Organisations”, International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, Vol. 4, 2004, pp.1827-1833. | download
New Media and New Learning
We moved to Melbourne in 1998 when Mary became Dean of the Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT. There, we began to research the ways in which the new media, information and communications environment was transforming not just the practical content of ‘literacy’, but, more broadly, our social worlds, and even our sensibilities.
At this time, bill co-ordinated a major project for the Australian Department of Industry on the impact of new technologies on publishing, Creator to Consumer in a Digital Age, and became involved in research and development work on semantic technologies, including the development of Common Ground Markup Language.
Also at this time, Mary became President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. Just what should the Council be advocating as an imaginative yet workable future for education? What should it be asking of Governments? The Deans tried to answer this question in a Charter which outlined an agenda for New Learning. This led us into a more widely encompassing reconsideration of the nature and role of education in a dramatically changing society.
In the early 2000s we returned to the down-to-earth world of classrooms and curriculum where we had begun several decades before, bringing together our longstanding concerns about learner diversity and pedagogy, and add to these our more recent insights into the new, digital media. Out of this mix, emerged the ‘Learning by Design’ project, examining the microdynamics of learning, and what it takes to engage diverse learners, living in a world where they are no longer content to be served up knowledge and replicate the right answers. These are new times, and a new generation will not necessarily respond well to the balance of agency that existed in earlier classrooms and families between teacher and learner, and adult and child. Our mission is to read the times, create learning environments appropriate to the times, and design institutions and pedagogies which enervate every fibre of subjectivity in today’s and tomorrow’s generations of learners.
In 2006, moved to the United States, and at an interestingly uncertain moment in the history of education. Mary became Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one the leading research Universities in the US, and Bill a Research Professor. This is a country with a deep educational traditions, a place where in the twentieth century, modern, ‘progressive’ education was invented, yet a place where the ‘back to basics’ movement has in recent decades undone much of that tradition with its swing back to rigid managerialism via testing, and skills and content-focused curriculum to match. The excesses and failures of this swing are now coming to light. Not only in the US, but around the world, people are coming to ask, ‘what will an education look like which is appropriate to the knowledge economy and which uses the new media?’ This is what prompted us to start putting together an agenda for a New Learning. This has translated into a series of publications, listed below, and also the development of an online masters degree in New Learning and New Literacies.
References
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education, Australian Council of Deans of Education, Canberra, 2001, 160pp. | download
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, ‘Designs for Learning’, e-Learning, Vol.1, No.1, 2004, pp.38-92. | download
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, ‘A Short History of Meaning’, International Journal of the Humanities, Vol.2, No.3, 2004, pp.2245-2250. | download
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘Text-Made Text’, e-Learning, Vol.1, No.2, 2004, pp.198-282. | download
Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis and Colin Lankshear, ‘A Contemporary Project: An Interview by Colin Lankshear’, e-Learning, Vol.2, No.2., 2005, pp. 192-207. | download
Kalantzis, Mary, Bill Cope, and the Learning by Design Project Group, Learning by Design, Victorian Schools Innovation Commission, Melbourne, 2005. | link
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, The Learning by Design Guide, Common Ground, Melbourne, 2006. | link
Kalantzis, Mary, 2006, ‘Changing Subjectivities, New Learning’, Pedagogies: An International Journal, Vol. 1, No.1, pp.7-12. | download
Kalantzis, Mary, ‘Elements of a Science of Education’, The Australian Educational Researcher, Vol.33, No.2, 2006, pp.15-42. | download
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, ‘Big Change Question—Taking into Account Mainstream Economic and Political Trends, Can/Should School Have a Role in Developing Authentic Critical Thinking? A Question of Truth: The Role of the ‘Critical’ in Pedagogy’, Journal of Educational Change, Vol. 7, No. 3, Oct. 2006, pp. 209-214. | download
Cope, Bill and Angus Phillips (eds.), The Future of the Book in the Digital Age, Chandos Publishing, Oxford UK, 2006. | link
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, ‘On Globalisation and Diversity’, Computers and Composition, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2006, Pages 402-411. | download
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘New Media, New Learning’, International Journal of Learning, Vol. 14, No.1, 2007, pp.75-79. | download
Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 304pp. | link
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘The Social Web: Changing Knowledge Systems in Higher Education’, in Debbie Epstein, Rebecca Boden, Rosemary Deem, Fazal Rizvi and Susan Wright (eds), Geographies of Knowledge, Geometries of Power: Framing the Future of Higher Education, World Yearbook of Education, Routledge, London, 2008, pp.371-384. | download
Cope, Bill. and Mary Kalantzis, Ubiquitous Learning, University of Illinois Press, 2009. | link
Analysing Academic Knowledge Systems
In 2009-2010, we have begun research into academic knowledge systems. Scholarly publishing is in a state crisis, and at the same time on the brink of potentially transformative change. This area of our research investigates academic publishing, descriptively as a series of business and technical processes, and analytically as a pivot point in the formal knowledge systems that are at the heart of our society’s understanding of itself and the natural world. For us, the central question for research into academic publishing is that of the immediate past and future shape of our knowledge design processes. Our research analyses the impact upon academic publishing of disruptive changes in our technological, economic, distributional, geographic, interdisciplinary and social relations to knowledge. This investigatory and theoretical work is complemented by the practical interventions of Common Ground Publishing.
References
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘Signs of Epistemic Disruption: Transformations in the Knowledge System of the Academic Journal, First Monday, Vol. 14, No.4, 2009. | link
Cope, Bill and Angus Phillips (eds), The Future of the Academic Journal, Woodhead, Cambridge UK, 2009 | link
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, The Role of the Internet in Changing Knowledge Ecologies, ARBOR Ciencia, Pensamientoy Cultura (Madrid, Spain), Vol. CLXXXV, No. 737, 2009, pp.521-530. | download
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, ‘The Social Web: Changing Knowledge Systems in Higher Education’, in Debbie Epstein, Rebecca Boden, Rosemary Deem, Fazal Rizvi and Susan Wright (eds), Geographies of Knowledge, Geometries of Power: Framing the Future of Higher Education, World Yearbook of Education, Routledge, London, 2008, pp.371-38 | download
Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis, and Liam Magee, Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research: Towards a Semantic Web, Woodhead, Cambridge UK, 2010 | Link.