The Multiliteracies Project: South African Teachers Respond Denise Newfield and Pippa Stein, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Abstract The present moment in South Africa is marked by profound and far-reaching changes as South Africans struggle to redefine their histories, identities and educational curricula. It is within this context of change that we, as English teacher- educators engaged with the International Multiliteracies Project in South African contexts - as a curriculum document for scrutiny and critical evaluation by practising and preservice teachers; as a pedagogic practice in our classrooms; and as an international political project seeking divergent and multiple collaborations. In this multimedia presentation, we take the opportunity to report on our two-year research project with inservice and preservice teachers concerning the applicability of the Multiliteracies Project for the South African context. What emerges from teachers on video, in writing and in other communicative modes is a form of 'writing back' - a complex response from a location in a postcolonial, developing country to ideas received from the 'centre'. 'This article represents a statement of general principle. It is highly provisional, and something we offer as a basis for public debate. We also want to establish relationships with teachers and researchers developing and testing curriculum...We want to stress that this is an open-ended process - tentative, exploratory, and welcoming of multiple and divergent collaborations.' The New London Group '...the Empire writes back to the Centre...' Salman Rushdie Introduction The present moment in South Africa is marked by profound and far- reaching change as South Africans struggle to redefine their histories and identities in the wake of the social transformations which have occurred since the first democratic elections in April 1994. The tertiary institution in which we work, the University of the Witwatersrand, is itself engaged in transformation as it strives to become more representative of South Africa's diverse communities. It is within this landscape of change that we, two English teacher-educators, read the New London Group's, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures and decided to engage with the International Multiliteracies Project at a number of levels. Firstly, as a pedagogic practice in our own classrooms; secondly, as a curriculum document for critical scrutiny and evaluation by our students, most of whom are practising teachers; and thirdly, as an international political project seeking divergent and multiple collaborations. We have found the International Multiliteracies Project in many ways inspirational. We did, however, have reservations about its top down nature and who it claims to be representing. It has ambitiously established itself as a global project but is currently headed up by academics from Australia, the USA and Britain, all post-industrial societies with massive resources. However, rather than dismiss the Project as another form of neo- colonialism which we, in the developing world, are being sucked in to, we have accepted the invitation to enter the public debate and through this article, take the opportunity to 'write back'. In so doing, we hope to contribute to the consultative process which we believe is fundamental to democratic education, and make the Project the truly international forum it has aimed to be. This article is a highly contextualised account of 'local diversity' and describes how we and our twenty four Masters in English Education students at the University of the Witwatersrand have appropriated aspects of the Project for our own uses. A major feature of this article is a compilation of our students' individual responses to the relevance and applicability of the Project for their specific educational contexts, which range from under-resourced schools in remote rural villages to slick, Internet-linked suburban schools in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. South Africa is engaged at present in major processes of transformation from the macro levels of government and policy-making to micro levels affecting the daily lives of ordinary citizens. While it has always been a multicultural and multilingual society, new forms of multiculturalism and multilingualism are only now emerging to replace the systematic division the apartheid laws had drawn across race and language lines. In the area of education, for example, the previously seventeen education departments, which were split along the lines of race and language, have been transformed into one national department of education. There used to be two official languages which all children had to learn at school-English and Afrikaans. Now there are eleven official languages and an official multilingual language policy for schools in the Gauteng region in which we work. In terms of curriculum design and innovation, a new pedagogy aiming at equity, access and looking towards future employment and empowerment is official policy. South Africa's media policy has likewise shifted, allowing for the diversification of TV channels. From one channel only alternating English and Afrikaans at the inception of TV in the 7Os, there are now three public channels and attempts to represent as many South African languages and cultures as possible. These channels broadcast homegrown and imported programs, mainly American, but increasingly British. Satellite television is now available-at a price-and the airwaves are being deregulated. In spite of a sense that South Africa has joined the global media community, acknowledgement of the role of the media in society and of different modes of communication has not been made in most of our schools. The verbal modes retains primacy and exclusivity, some would argue rightly so, since ours is a country with far from universal adult literacy. For the majority of South Africans, the Internet and even computers are a technology reserved only for the elite. South Africa is ranked 14th in the world when it comes to Internet usage, but 97% of those who use the Net are from the affluent middle classes. Particular problems related to computer installation and usage are the absence of electricity or even phone lines in many areas. The institutional context in which we work and had the opportunity to implement aspects of the Multiliteracies Project is the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, an historically white university, with a history of liberalism and opposition to the apartheid government. Universities in South Africa are undergoing radical restructuring or 'transformation' in order to become more representative of South Africa's diverse communities and Wits is no exception. It is currently perceived by some academics and students as conservative and lagging behind other universities in affirmative action policies and representivity. The Masters by Coursework in English Education was set up in 1996 as a joint initiative by three departments to address the changing needs of professionals working in the area of English education in a post-apartheid South Africa. This includes primary, secondary and tertiary teachers, adult educators, English subject advisors, curriulum designers, ELT materials developers and educational publishers. In keeping with a complex view of the subject 'English', this course is interdisciplinary, drawing on teaching staff from the Departments of African Literature, Applied English Language Studies, English, Linguistics, and Education. The course consists of a single mandatory core module within an otherwise optional modular structure. The aim of the core module is to explore 'cutting edge' conceptual, political and pedagogical issues relating to the teaching of English as literature, language and media from a local and global perspective. In contrast with existing post-graduate courses in southern African universities, the course experiments with different pedagogical models, modes of assessment* and content. This is the socio-historical and institutional context in which we read A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. What immediately attracted our interest was the highly contemporary, pro-active nature of the document. The focus on 'designing social futures' converged with our own personal and political aims as English teacher-educators in South Africa. The pedagogical framework of Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed Practice appeared to theorise some of our own pedagogic practices and beliefs. The emphasis on diversity, difference and change as a natural condition of living in the postmodern world mirrored our own experiences of social transformation. The concept of 'Multiliteracies' appealed to us: it is highly political in its challenge to the monolithic, autonomous model of literacy which dominates in schools and development agencies in this country. 'Multiliteracies' captures and validates the diversity of people's literacies in specific sites and has a flexibility which seeks to include rather than marginalise. We have interpreted Multiliteracies in a broad sense to include technological forms of communication as well as the literacies (mainly orally based) of communities in South Africa who have not had access to print based or screen based technologies. For us, the value of the document lies in its dual acknowledgement of Multiliteracies as the paradigm for social and cultural understandings and knowledges, and for multimodal and technologically based forms of communication available today. We implemented the Multiliteracies Project in two ways, both as a pedagogic practice within sections of the Masters course and as a curriculum document for critical evaluation by our students on the Masters course. Although the focus of this chapter is on how we used the Multiliteracies Project as a curriculum document for critical evaluation by our students, we want to describe briefly some of the ways in which we interpreted the pedagogical framework and basic principles of Design in our own teaching practices in order to provide an idea of other forms of our implementation of the Project. Using the proposition that 'curriculum is a design for social futures' (NLG 1996:73), we implemented aspects of the Project within sections of the Masters course, where it furnished key conceptual principles for both structure and pedagogic practice. In the module, Theory, Evaluation and Development of Teaching Materials, the concept of exposing learners to multiple discourses and multiple Englishes through classroom-based materials which draw on their diverse representational resources (the visual, the performative, the written, the oral, the behavioural, the gestural) is an explicit course aim. One student began work on a multi-media CD Rom aimed at developing children's environmental awareness in under-resourced rural communities. Another student devised a workbook on oral storytelling practices for Tsonga speaking children, where students had to compare and contrast different English translations of a well-known Tsonga oral narrative. The module, Visual Literacy and the Role of Media in English Education aimed at exploring aspects of multimodality and media education especially in relation to the visual mode. The 'production assignment' required students to produce media materials or programs with a prominent visual component, for the purposes of English education. Two students used video as an investigative medium in relation to 'rave' culture, while a group of three devised a slide-tape program with authentic music to introduce South African students to the novel, The African Child by Camara Laye of Guinea. A secondary school teacher got his class to portray Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as a photostory in which they were actors and photographers. In both modules, we paid particular attention to the concepts of Situated Practice and Critical Framing, constantly encouraging students to engage with their own classroom contexts and practices in a critically reflective way, taking into account the socio-historical and ideological context in which they were working. The New London Group's article A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures was initially one of the recommended readings for the core module section on language education. A small group of students summarised the article for oral presentation in class and one student demonstrated how she was using the pedagogical framework to teach Engineering students report writing. Our own interest in investigating students' responses to the Project in a more systematic way occurred towards the end of the course, when we were searching for a suitable reading to set for critical discussion in the examination. We chose the NLG's article and in so doing, started research process which we shall now describe in more detail. Research Project on South African Responses to the Document The research process was qualitative in design and evolved over one year. It involved three forms of data collection: written responses from 24 students; videotaped interviews with 6 of the 24 students and audiotaped oral interviews with 2 students. As will be evident in the following account, the dialogic and organic nature of the research process was central to capturing a range of diverse, complex and sometimes contradictory positions on the Project. For the written responses, students were given the NLG article to read one week prior to the examination. In the examination they had one and a half hours in which to answer the following question: This article represents a statement of general principle. It is highly provisional, and something we offer as a basis for public debate...We want to stress that this is an open-ended process-tentative, exploratory, and welcoming of multiple and divergent collaborations. And, above all, our aim is to make some sort of difference for real children in real classrooms' (NLG; 96) Provide a critical response to the International Multiliteracies Porject in which you evaluate the relevance and applicability of the Project to English Education in the South\Southern African context (or to a particular educational site or sites within southern Africa). NB: (I) Your response should be located within an educational site or sites that you are familar with. (ii) Focus on one or a few ideas that are important to you and evaluate them carefully. It is imposssible to respond to more in the time available. Before the students wrote this question, they were aware of the very real possibility of submission of their answers to the New London Group. This crossing of the line between the genre of examination script, (which is usually a discrete and confidential textual form, written for one reader, and locked away from the author forever), and a written submission to a real audience in response to an invitation, gave the written task an authenticity and immediacy which was reflected in the carefully considered nature of their responses*. All 24 students took seriously the opportunity to engage in a critical dialogue with the New London Group about the relevance of the Project to their specific contexts and this exercise was, we believe, a good example of Critical Framing in relation to Situated Practice. The second phase of our implementation involved a modal and generic shift from a formal, written critical evaluation to a one and a half minute video interview. We wanted to situate our students visually in their institutional contexts: 'Multiliteracies' implied giving our students more than one mode in which to respond, as well as challenging us to present the research through a range of media. We considered, for example, using photographic slides, as an inexpensive means of documenting the sites where our students worked, and which could be used as data to contextualise visually their written responses. However, we chose the medium of video on account of its capacity to capture both background and speech, contextualised and communicatively complex in its presentation of the place, manner and author of the utterance, visually and verbally. The video would give voice literally to members of the student group in their places of work. We edited in camera to reduce our own inevitable mediation and to aim for a documentary quality. In shooting at each site, we followed the conventional filmic structure of wide>mid>close shot, ie general to specific. We wanted an establishing shot to capture the locales, for example, Soweto seen from the Teacher Training College, what the Farm School looked like; then a bridging shot, for example, of the teacher in her/his classroom, or arriving at the school, followed by a close-up shot of the person talking about the context and responding to the Multiliteracies Project. In terms of our generic choice, voice- over narration would have been counter-productive, so narrative linkage had to be achieved visually. As our interviewees worked in places geographically distant, culturally dissimilar, and disparate in terms of resources, though all within the Gauteng region, we tried to convey visually a sense of the literal and metaphoric journey we were undertaking. For example, we shot Wilhelm Van Rensburg entering his office which was decorated with a large poster of Mandela next to a poster of Elizabeth I; we shot a stream of smart cars driving up the road outside Micheal Goodman's school in Parktown, an upmarket business centre of Johannesburg to contrast with Sean o'Connor arriving for work in his bakkie (a 4-wheel drive open truck) at the farm school. At Werner Paetzold's school in the once right-wing Afrikaner stronghold of Boksburg, we shot a semiotically rich bridging sequence of a young blonde boy raising South Africa's new flag. As only a selection of the 24 members of the class were filmed, we held a viewing of the 1O minute video for the class as a whole, in which students were invited to respond to the video text. This was followed by further oral discussion on the video text, in a smaller group, which was recorded on audiotape. All in all, over a period of one year, these intertextual dialogues gained their own momentum and cumulatively provide a rich, heteroglossic response to issues within the Multiliteracies Project from a highly specific context. The video was shown and our students' responses presented to the Domains of Literacy Conference at the Institute of Education, London in September 1996. A copy of the video has been used in Australia, where the South African responses have themselves engendered further responses. The Data Analysis of Trends: General Overview What follows is an overview of the recurrent themes and ideas that emerged from the three sets of data collected: the written texts, the videotape interviews, and the conversations recorded on audiotape. Convergences and disagreements from the written data were recorded manually, and tested against the video interviews and audio recording of the oral conversations. The general overview of trends is followed by a selection of individual student's responses in order to provide a more in- depth record and to let their voices be heard. In analysing the general trends in the data, we are fully aware of the problems around the status of the written texts as examination scripts and our multiple roles as teachers, assessors and researchers. This may have impacted on the students' responses in certain ways. Similarly, because of the implicit power relations between institutions, students and teachers, our students were not in a position to refuse to answer the examination question or ignore the call to enter the dialogue on the Multiliteracies Project. The overall response to the Multiliteracies Project in all three forms of data was highly positive. A clear sense of engagement with the document emerged in every case. Not one respondee rejected the document's relevance and applicability to southern Africa at the present time. On the contrary, in spite of serious misgivings about aspects of the document, every student responded positively to the Project's explicit call for curricular change, and to the document's positioning of itself as a vehicle of change. The document seemed to speak directly to the students' sense of urgency regarding 'transformation' within the tertiary institution where they were registered as students and within the institutions in which they were working or had worked. The need for change came through loud and clear - with regard to the changed and changing classrooms, especially in relation to racial and cultural difference; or, to the necessity for curricular and pedagogic change; or, to the importance of broadening the existing notion of literacy to enable children and adults to be educated in such a way as to prepare them for the present and the future. Hyreath Lodge sums this up by saying that the document is 'appropriate to the historical moment.' Magauta Mphahalele's and Desiree Raichlin's written responses serve as typical examples of what most respondees found laudable in the Project: The Multiliteracies Project is innovative and dynamic and tries to deal with issues that face English teachers all over the world. (Magauta Mphahlele:written text) I am a lecturer at Boston City Campus in the fields of English Education and Business Communication and the Multiliteracies Project article really spoke volumes to me. First of all, when it stated that its intention was 'to spark ideas for possible new research areas,' and that it might help 'frame curriculum experimentation that attempts to come to grips with our changing educational environment,' it reinforced my belief that external curriculum is a highly indeterminate animal and that the issue for curriculum theory in South Africa becomes one of providing an orderly, coherent set of experiences, each of which is flexible enough to provide the appropriate challenge and support to students whose knowledges, skills, socio-economic and political 'lifeworlds' may differ widely from one another. (Desiree Raichlin: written text) Students found the Project 'exciting' (Magauta Mphahlele),'a great project' (Pia Lamberti), and as expressive of a 'necessary utopianism' (Sean O' Connor). They felt it encouraged both experimentation and critical reflection, validated Howard Gardner's's concept of multiple intelligences (Werner Paetzold), and was a fundamentally democratic, antiracist and socially responsible document (Anthony Johnson). A number of pedagogic strategies and aims in the document were found to be useful, such as Overt Instruction and 'scaffolding' (Wilhelm van Rensburg and Arlene Archer), and the offer of a variety of literacies and technologies within the English curriculum. Also positively viewed were the potential for introducing a broader and more inclusive canon that would incorporate popular culture, and the impetus given to Redesigning and Transformed Practice. However, the data as a whole did not reveal an easy and uncritical acceptance of ideas in the document. Situated critique was a strong feature of the responses. A number of respondees found the document to be utopian, in its negative sense, for a range of reasons. Foremost among these were reservations about implementation, particularly in terms of human and material resources. Thandiwe Mkhabela and David Duma are concerned about the retraining of teachers that that a Multiliteracies project would necessitate, especially in relation to knowledge about and skills in non-verbal modes, while Sean O' Connor believes that unless social and economic problems are sorted out first in areas such as the peri-urban/ semi-rural one in which his school is situated, implementing a Multiliteracies project is futile. Others point to the difficulties in attempting to implement change through a democratic process in schools: It's very banal... There are a lot of committees going on in the country at the moment stressing openness, transparency and including all the stakeholders. What happens when they try to transform the syllabus or learning programs and the way in which subjects are divided up is that it becomes a slow and bureaucratic process which can be a bit disillusioning. (Ruth Nicola: oral interview) A number of students express concern about the tensions between between access to power through the dominant language/s and discourse/s and validation of marginalised cultures and languages (Catherine Beaton, Barbara Baloyi, Magauta Mphahlele). Sean O' Connor takes issue with the document's tendency to universalise economic paradigms and workplace relations in post-industrial, complex societies: The South African workplace is the site of furious dialectical struggle between management and labour, which in one sense disqualifies the formation of "flattened hierarchies" which are allegedly a feature of 'fast capitalism'. Indeed, our non-unionised workplace contexts are characterised by neo-feudal relations, made possible largely by the value of labour and the legacy of apartheid. There are elements of post-Fordist organisation in our economy but they are few and difficult to target. (Sean o'Connor: written text) Some students are concerned about the thin dividing line between Overt Instruction and 'prescriptive authoritarianism'. Some of the students are concerned about representivity and issues of power in relation to the Project, asking whether the project can truly be deemed international, and whether the Project, in spite of itself, does not serve further to privilege English and reinforce European conceptions of knowledge and culture. Anthony Johnson is amongst those who point to a possible conflict between the 'flattened hierarchies' of the document and the hierarchical demarcations, say, between father and son or teacher and pupil that are a common feature of African communities. 'I'm interested in how this Project integrates into all sorts of cultures. If you read it carefully, the teacher is almost powerless in the classroom situation. Some quarters respect this type of division between the teachers and the students but it is not going to fit in properly into some cultures where there are demarcations - father and son, a teacher and a pupil...once you collapse the boundaries it's going to affect some aspects of the cultures - now pupils are no more respecting teachers...' (Anthony Johnson: oral interview) A few students are particularly concerned with accepting a simplistic view of multiculturalism: 'We cannot rely on the multiculturalists to protect and further the interest of black South Africans in particular. Teachers should challenge the English versions of democracy. Education produces not only knowledge but political subjects. The failure by educators to critically examine the implicit acceptance of middle class and white values has served to perpetuate the status quo in South Africa.' (Barbara Baloyi, written response) A number of students point to the omission in the document of adequate discussion on the place of literature and on the role of assessment, and to a seemingly exclusive focus on education for children when education for adults is a huge concern for developing countries (Deborah Hunt). The way in which the students responded to the document and the range of comments it elicited indicate a level of engagement with issues that interested them. It is clear that they did not respond to all sections of the document. They have indicated areas of consonance and estrangement between themselves and the document, and issued challenges to the Project for it to take up and consider. Individual Voices: The Students Respond We have already indicated the multimodal levels at which students were engaged in responding to the Multiliteracies Project. In this section, we quote the students' written, audio and video texts in a more extended way, without commentary from us. The constraints placed on us by having to use the written medium only to convey the vividness, complexity and essentially dialogic nature of the videotaped and audiotaped interviews are enormous. What we have decided upon, then, is to try to give you some sense of these intertextual dialogues by juxtaposing extracts from the videotext with sections of the audiotext. We have transcribed these texts verbatim, as we also wish to highlight the generic and modality differences in the textual forms which students produced. These will be followed by the students' written responses, some of which are quoted at length to give you a fuller sense of the structure of their critiques. Extract 1 from Video Text Interviewee: Wilhelm Janse van Rensburg Wilhelm says about himself, 'I am a detribalised, white Afrikaner who grew up on a farm but changed all of that for the big city. I switched from studying at a conservative Afrikaans-medium university to do all my post-graduate studies at English-medium, liberal and revisionist universities. I am an English teacher- educator.' Extract from Wilhelm's interview: I teach at the Soweto College of Education, a pre-service teacher-training institution...our students are mainly second or third language speakers of English and I think Overt Instruction is important for them...the idea of scaffolding activities so that they get acquainted with the language and can use the language fluently...I think it's also important is that they are being increasingly called upon to teach in previously white schools in South Africa and we need to prepare them to teach in new cultural settings ...I think there are two problems with the Multiliteracies Project...the first one is literature...the project itself mentions the fact that one should steer clear of the English canon but nothing more...and I think if one does want to give access to the dominant discourse it is important to give them a sense of the English canon...secondly the project itself mentions evaluation should be done in a developmental way but nothing more than that and I think more attention could be given to that...' Extract 3 from Video Text Interviewee: Magauta Mphahlele Magauta says about herself, 'I'm a black woman from a so-called disadvantaged home, teaching in a predominantly white university. Perceptions are that I am privileged to be in that position. For me the word 'privileged' is problematic-it means I am one of a few elites, but for me, my languages, my meanings and my voice are just that - mine.' 'One of the things that I think alienates black students from so- called white universities is the issue of language because they are torn between the need to acquire English and at the same time the need to feel that their languages, their cultures, are being acknowledged and the problem is although in a multicultural classroom other languages will be included I think that will always be tokenistic because at the end the students have to be assessed in the dominant language and within the dominant discourse ...' Extract from Audiotape Setting: Seminar Room, Wits University. Context: Two students, Anthony Johnson (AJ) and Ruth Nicola (RN) have just watched the videotape and are being interviewed by Pippa Stein (PS) on their response to the tape. Anthony Johnson is a secondary school teacher from Ghana, has lived in Swaziland and is a currently studying in South Africa. He is a published writer and oral poet. He says of himself, 'I love to teach in multilingual and multicultural classrooms where the English language is spoken from many tongues and in different tones but with one meaning - communication!' Ruth Nicola has taught English in Israel and now teaches in a media centre in a primary school in Johannesburg. She says, 'I have taught English at various levels to second language speakers. I am interested in the way young children from diverse backgrounds use language/s with their peers.' PS: Anthony, do you want to respond to any points that were made on the video... AJ: Ya, the first point made about the canon - PS: Talk about the canon... AJ: Ya, the canon has been sort of contested so much...it's a sort of very paradoxical issue in the sense that if you are learning a language there must be some particular set of works which in fact you draw on, in every language not necessarily in English ...it should be there as a beacon or a guidance ... but at the same time I use the word paradoxical in the sense that at the same time we should also give recognition to emerging sort of writings... PS: Do you think ...do you accept the idea that there are some works of literature that are better than others? AJ: I wouldn't say...use...the word better- PS: What word would you use? AJ: (laughs) I would use the word...that they are older...and something like examples...they have set a pace - they are pace-setters..because what I am saying is that for a language or a literature it must have some sort of history...we must start from a point and starting from that point we normally draw on those canons...the only thing we don't have to say is that they are better... we just have to say, 'They came first. This is how they did it and this is how we are doing it now...Are we different from them or the same ?' ...if you are acquiring knowledge you must have some sort of a map so drawing on the canon is like drawing a map... PS: Well I suppose questions of value are implicit in that...Ruth do you want to respond to something from the video which struck you? RN: Yes well let's talk about Wilhelm's point...I think he was referring both to the literary canon and to the use of language itself...standard language...and I think both aspects apply here...that we do have to give students access to the dominant discourse...in terms of questions of value I think a work of art may be better than another but not on the basis of being colonial or not from mother England... PS: It seems to me one of the central questions - in relation to Multiliteracies and multiculturalism is around providing access...it goes to the heart of what Magauta is saying on the video about tokenism...how do you manage to get a balance or redefine the relationship between the dominant or so-called marginalised which you are trying to make emergent or dominant...are there just inherent contradictions? AJ: I think that what is going to happen is that there's going to be some kind of osmosis...English drawing on other South African languages and other languages drawing on English...in some years to come a sort of emergent language will come PT3 pasted here: out...from my experience with some of the West Afrcian languages there are some words in English you cannot avoid ...it has become part of the language what's called Ghanaian English...it's a matter of languages being very flexible andabsorbing from each other... RN: English is a natural lingua franca and we should exploit itfor that...I personally get enjoyment out of so called colonial literature which is really English literature from other countries...I get pleasure out of the fact that those writers learnt beautiful English and have a wider audience as a result...So I agree we need to keep that access, finding a balance is difficult... PS: The Multiliteracies Project is written up in English...for an English speaking audience...it seems to privilege English as a language...I wonder about the cultural politics of this, surely the Project is a project for all languages... AJ: If people from developing countries had been brought in from the beginning, this might have been sorted out...but these questions can still be addressed... Written text Author: Barbara Baloyi Barbara Baloyi speaks five African languages and works in English teacher development in rural schools where children speak English as a second or third language. Barbara is particularly keen to bring media education to these remote, under-resourced and marginalised schools. So far, the education system in South Africa has managed to privilege English and speakers of English...even worse, it has privileged European conceptions of knowledge and cultures at the expense of indigenous cultures in the country. The experience of the European child has been validated in the school classroom and curriculum. This view of English learning as natural, neutral and beneficial seems to prevail amongst English teachers. There is even among black pupils, parents and academics in South Africa a self-satisfied assumption that English is good and can serve as a unifying tool to the diversity and multicultural nature of this country. English teachers have on their hands an enormous task of contesting the ways in which the English language is directly and indirectly imposed onto the lives of the many people who do not share this language as their first language and whose future is determined by the ability to understand or not understand English. Extract 2 from Video Text Interviewee: Micheal Goodman Micheal Goodman is a deputy principal of Grantley College, a private, independent secondary school in Johannesburg which caters for children with learning difficulties. He says of himself, ' I am an openly gay teacher. I find therefore the Multiliteracies Project's need for an explicit pedagogy compatible with my world view. This allows me to hold with the Project despite my criticisms of it.' Extract 'I thought the Multiliteracies Project offered a great deal to our school in terms of offering our students access to a variety of literacies that they wouldn't have been exposed to previously...my reservations came however in terms of teachers needs for such a project ...the context I work in the teachers tend to be quite conservative and it concerns me that they would need to be re-educated and re-trained in those areas ...of more concern was the idea that some of the designs require really specific knowledge or skills for example visual design I have absolutely no competence in whereas the art teacher does so a way around that would perhaps be to go towards a language across the curriculum option but that means restructuring our schools, reconsidering policy changes and issues in those sorts of areas...' Written Response Author: David Kaplan David Kaplan is an English and Afrikaans secondary school teacher at a Jewish community school in Johannesburg. He is extremely interested in the theoretical and practical ways in which English teaching is changing. I teach at King David High School in Linksfield and many parents and pupils share the belief that there is no hope (for South Africa). I do not. I feel that we are facing challenges which are exciting and worthwhile. We have to move away from old established beliefs to create a country where all have equal opportunity and access. English and the teaching of English can play a very important and vital role in this change. We have a sister school, Eastbank, in Alexandra township which comes to King David once a week for lessons in various subjects. They have a debating team which compared to the King David team, is very weak. We decided to form a debating society. This theoretically was all very sound - we would impart our knowledge to the less fortunate. This led to many problems. I discovered that the two worlds were completely different. They had nothing in common. It was useless to discuss a point because it meant completely different things to the sets of pupils. We had to come to some common ground. We knew nothing of their world and they knew nothing of our world. We decided to use the media, for I discovered that every one of the children whether from Kind David or Eastbank had a TV. Some of the more wealthy Eastbank children had video cameras. So I asked them to make a video of a typical day in their lives and next week we would discuss it. They did, and we found that we did have a great deal in common , their parents complained about the same things, their parents had similar aspirations for their children. The children had similar dreams and ambitions and fears. What we had done, I think, is take an established design and re- design it. We had established a common identity from two previously thought of different identities. My experience in my classroom and with the Eastbank children has given me courage to test sacred cows, not to feel inferior, to encourage my pupils to constantly question established norms and designs. That redesigning does not necessarily mean disregarding what we have but reshaping it and allowing it to become accessible to a new generation. Written Extract Author: Pat Hill Pat Hill teaches Language and Communication on bridging courses for underprepared engineering students at Wits University. She says, 'I find a tension between my responsibility to give access to a fairly rigid discourse and my aim to build confidence in my students.' Engineering discourse is expressive of a discipline which regards itself as scientific, elitist and a strange mixture of the academic and practical. It is expressed in language which is concise, precise, and structured in a linear and tightly sequenced manner. It is especially frustrating for students from other cultures for whom being concise may be rude, who think in different temporal and spatial modes and who, as non-native speakers of English, may find it difficult to find the precise word. The genre of report writing is a peculiar convention with a rigid sequence and framework, minimal expression and voiceless objectivity. The students wish to master this as it is the gatekeeper to the profession. For the first time, this year, I have explored with the students other modes of reporting in their own cultures. In their own language groups, students discussed and then reported back on such features as what was reported, who reported, how and why. They were excited and fascinated by the responses from other groups. It was found, inter alia, that events are reported through a hierarchy to the chief, mainly orally, and that community events are often reported non-verbally, for example, by flags. In one situation, when a delegate to a youth orientation is killed, his parents are told symbolically, by the pouring out of porridge. Differences were noted between rural and urban traditions, which brought in conventions of writing, so that as well as denaturalisng the very Western genre of Engineering report writing, this activity also built a bridge between it and reporting in other cultures. This was useful as a form of critical practice. In terms of Transformed Practice...and the practice across contexts, I find this difficult to imagine. I would hope that the variety of reports and other writing practised in the course would be capable of transfer to different branches and the confidence acquired would allow students to write for their own purposes. Written extract Author: Sean O' Connor Sean is the principal of a small farm school outside Johannesburg which caters for the children of farm workers. He is interested in alternative schools and pedagogies. I would argue that in the NLG's and other theorists' considerations of 'what students need' and hence 'what teachers must do', teachers are actually constructed or understood as capable. This is not always the case. It is all very well to encourage teachers to become 'transformative intellectuals' (Giroux's term) and urge them to locate and inhabit sufficient material conditions in order to operate efficiently, but the 'how' of this remains vague, even confusing. The terminology of 'design' related by the NLG typifies an obfuscating discourse, despite its pretensions to be helpful, especially in this context. South Africa in many contexts, (especially in township and rural schools) lacks a meaningful 'culture of learning' and by this I refer to typical problems encountered in the type of school I work in, where an average of 3O % of teaching staff are professionally unqualified. Attendance is sporadic, amongst staff and students. Child and alcohol abuse is common. Many of the pressing problems in our schools like gangsterism, may be alleviated, challenged or even eradicated by excellent teaching and learning, but it is unlikely. The 'professional' discourse of the NLG cannot take the other factors which bear upon this context into consideration. A shift in curricular content (accessing context) is imperative, yet such a shift, should be couched in language that is itself accessible and not pungent with the discourse of power. Written text Author: Magauta Mphahlele (See previous biography above) South Africa needs an approach like the Multiliteracies Project but we need to question whether we have not only the resources but the teachers and students who have the capacity to implement such an ambitious project. This does not mean that South African teachers and students cannot or lack the mental capacity to deal with issues affecting their classrooms but the experience is that in schools teachers are battling with issues of coping with large student numbers and basic things like furniture. The issue of unqualified teachers and teachers' professionalism are still problems. There are still struggles and conflicts around the transformation of both schools and universities and one wonders how and where to start implementing such a project especially when sections of our community are obsessed with maintaining so called standards... It is difficult to see how teachers can easily replace the old with the new especially when the new is primarily focused on challenging or changing the new status quo - which they are rapidly becoming part of. Teachers themselves are not sure of how to deal with these issues especially as most see themselves as transmitters of neutral knowledge that will serve their students well in the future. The question of diversity is also crucial in our new democracy where because of its fragility, people are still tentative in their demands for change, or where those demands are expressed, a lot of compromises (often at the disadvantage of those advocating for change) have to be made. Teachers in South Africa are unsure about their futures as talk about retrenchments and restructuring abound. Colleges are being closed down and resources directed elsewhere. Teachers have to make certain adjustments, for example, most have never taught in racially mixed and multilingual classrooms, some do not even speak the languages spoken by most pupils in their classrooms. Others, because of the previous government's influence on teacher education, especially black teacher education, and the top-down approach to curriculum development, cannot be said to be expert enough in their fields to be able to deal with and adequately implement the Multiliteracies project. We also live in a country where some teachers of English are not proficient enough in the language to be able to deal with the complex language involved in teaching, for example, metalanguage. Violent eruptions in certain schools recently demonstrate that teachers are still not experienced in handling conflict that arises when students of different language and racial backgrounds come together. Teachers also carry loads from the past and need to rethink their positions when it comes to racial tolerance and acceptance. Teachers also need to redefine thier roles both as teachers and citizens becasue some teachers have been known to resist teaching critical views of language saying that they are not politicians. I have focused my critique on the problems within the teaching profession but this by no means implies that South Africa has no teachers who can face the challenges facing teachers here and all over the world. We have teachers in South Africa who have worked under the most taxing conditions but who have been able to do wonderful work. Conclusion Our year long engagement with the Multiliteracies Project has been immensely rewarding. There was a kind of chemistry in the process, that ignited half-realised ideas and aspirations, gave them form and meaning, and resulted in different modes of participation in public debate. The process of our engagement is, we believe, testimony to the Project's flexibility and potentiality which allow multiple entry points, interpretations and forms of implementation. We would like to claim that our research process has indeed been a project in appropriating and redesigning an available design. 'Every act of meaning both appropriates Available Designs and recreates in the Designing, thus producing new meaning as The Redesigned' (NLG 1996:p 88). This process of redesigning has paradoxically brought our own context into sharp focus, revealing clearly to us the complex and challenging space we inhabit in the transition between an Apartheid past and a reconstructed future, where a relevant and useful curriculum still needs to be invented. We believe that the Multiliteracies Project has a valuable contribution to make to that reconstruction. We hope that the ideas generated through the research process we have described can contribute to the Project's ongoing theoretical and pedagogical development. We also hope that this act of 'writing back' from a location in the developing world assists in the diversification of the Multiliteracies Project by expanding its membership and enlarging the ambit of its debate.

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