Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1, March 2003
BILL COPE
Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, 73 The Esplanade, Altona, VIC
3018, Australia
ANDREW HARVEY
Australian Council of Deans of Education, c/o RMIT, PO Box 71, Bundoora, VIC
3083, Australia
ABSTRACT
Introduction
At a time when they are perhaps least desirable, standardised basics skills testing
regimes are increasing [1]. The quest for accountability and commensurability has
focused global attention on producing education outcomes which are simple to
interpret, tangible and transparent, and easily comparable. This is done in the
interests of individual learners, who are seen to benefit from a culture of competition, and from the accretion of knowledge committed to their individual memories.
It is also done in the name of those whose delivery and rationalisation of education
resources is aided by figures that are comparable and easily interpreted. Finally, the
testing regime is justified in the name of parents who, it is argued, increasingly
ISSN 0969-594X print; ISSN 1465-329X online/03/010015-12 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0969594032000085721
16
M. Kalantzis et al.
demand extensive information about the progress of their children. According to the
prevailing wisdom, regular, universal, standardised testing provides accountability to
the system, easily digestible information to parents, and regularly updated knowledge of the progress and relative competencies of individual students (Bush, 2001;
Honeywood, 2002).
The effects of this outlook extend beyond assessment techniques to the curriculum taught. Indeed, the increase in standardised testing reflects, and further promotes, curriculum models which are focused around the so-called basics of
numeracy and literacy. Dominant extant assessment regimes are reinforcing these
old basics, but the very concepts of numeracy and literacy, and the skills required by
students, are themselves changing dramatically in the new economy (Australian
Council of Deans of Education, 2001; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Luke, 2000).
Assessment techniques therefore need to be altered, in many cases quite radically, to
promote new learning and to measure more accurately the skills required for success
in the twenty-first century.
Outlining these required skills is important, and can only be done by situating
education in the context of the new economy. The following section addresses this
context, arguing that a new basics is emerging, demanding skills and competencies
that cannot be measured by testing regimes focused on the old basics of literacy and
numeracy. Particular attention is given here to the possible reconceptualisation of
literacy and its ramifications for assessment techniques. A complex, diverse society,
in which knowledge has become the engine of national development and selffulfilment, requires a much more multifaceted approach to tracking and reporting
the educational achievements of individuals and educational institutions.
Finally, alternatives to current assessment procedures are canvassed, and it is
argued that a diverse range of techniques is necessary to measure the broad skills and
attributes required in the new economy. Moreover, instead of an individualised
learning outputs approach to educational performance measurement, this paper
advocates a systemic process of benchmarking learning inputsmeasuring teaching
skills, school resources, community resources. It is the authors contention that this
is the most reliable and more usefully predictive measure of educational performance.
Knowledge and Learners in the New Economy
Framers of both curriculum and assessment must be cognisant of the important
changes in contemporary economic, cultural and civic circumstances. The Australian Council of Deans of Education (2001) has argued that knowledge today is
distinguished by three characteristics: it is highly situated; rapidly changing; and
more diverse than ever before. To claim that knowledge is highly situated is to
highlight its increasingly particularist nature: knowledge today is very specifically
linked into an area of specialist knowledge, or a particular technology, or a particular
subcultural interest, or a particular community group (Gee, 2000). This sheer range
of alternatives and life-wide settings severely limits the effectiveness of any curriculum focused around empirically right and wrong answers, or of any assessment
18
M. Kalantzis et al.
etc); sub-culturally and ethnically defined accents, registers and dialects; and interlanguages (Lo Bianco, 2000). Immigration, multiculturalism and global economic
integration and communications technologies make these matters of increasing
practical importance.
Paradoxically, the globalisation of communications and labour markets make
differences in communication patterns and forms a more critical local issue. Not
only do local diversities/global proximities mean that communication is increasingly
a matter of negotiating discourse differences. The new technologies of the virtual
also allow the creation of ever-more dispersed and differentiated discourse communities (ethnic-diasporic, professional, of interest/affect), as well as requiring the
constant crossing of borders, be that in neighbourhood living, or niche marketing, or
processes of citizen-participation, to note some major areas requiring new communicative competence in an era of cultural pluralism. In this environment, the
question of the basics of learning needs to be re-examined (Kalantzis & Cope,
1999). Literacy itself needs to be conceived of more broadly than the coding of oral
to written language, to include what we have termed Multiliteracies (Cope &
Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996).
Multiliteracies and Communications Technologies
Within the literacy paradigm, then, the qualities that will be required by effective
learners in future are clearly evident. The diversification of the communications
environment demands that effective learners will be flexible, autonomous, and able
to work with cultural and linguistic diversity. Moreover, the need for collaboration,
and for problem-solving skills, is further evidenced by a second major change to the
way we must conceive of literacy. This is the nature of new communications
technologies.
Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodalin which writtenlinguistic modes of meaning interface with visual, aural, gestural and spatial patterns
of meaning (Gilster, 1997; Mitchell, 1995). Moreover, our recent Creator to
Consumer research (Cope & Freeman, 2001; Cope & Mason, 2001) indicates that
the most recent digital technologies for the creation and dissemination of text
require explicit metalanguages along the general lines of the multimodal functional
grammar which has developed as a component of the Multiliteracies research,
including a capacity to deal with cultural and linguistic differences within and
between languages (Cope & Gollings, 2001). Within the Multiliteracies paradigm,
analysing the structure and social uses of the emerging digital technologies is critical.
Most importantly, the new technologies, and more broadly the changing social
worlds of work and citizenship, require a new educational response. The imagery of
the old technology and the old world of work is clear and familiarthe factories with
smokestacks piercing the horizon which we used to see as signs of progress. Behind
the factory walls was the heavy plant which added up to the fixed assets of industrial
capitalism. Geared for long-run mass production of manufactured things, human
beings became mere appendages to the machine. Indeed, the logic of the production
line minimised human skill requirements, as tasks were divided into smaller and
20
M. Kalantzis et al.
economy. Actually, despite the hype, we dont just live on knowledge, as if the
economy has suddenly abandoned making things for trading in information and
symbols. We cannot live on symbols alone. But symbols are nevertheless everywhere. They are at the heart of new technologies, and especially the technologies of
digital convergencein the areas of communications, automated manufacturing,
e-commerce and the media. Even in the manufacturing sector where people still
energetically make things, they now make them using screen-based interfaces, and
these are linguistically, visually and symbolically driven. The production line is still
there, but now robots are screwing on the bolts. These technologies, moreover, are
constantly shifting.
The new technologies are software rather than hardware intensive, as well as
flexible and open to multiple uses. Software replacements are made far more
frequently than was the case for plant replacement in the old economy. This means
that technical knowledge has a shorter and shorter shelf-life. Up-skilling needs to
occur continuously. Indeed, contrary to the old economy process of de-skilling, you
need to be multiskilled, to be more flexible, more able to undertake a range of tasks,
and able to shift from one task to another as needs be. The key competitive
advantage for an organisation, even the value of that organisation, is no longer
grounded in the value of its fixed assets and plant, or at least not in that alone, but
in the skills and knowledge of its workforce. Indeed, technology is now very much
a relationship between tools and the knowledge of these tools in peoples heads.
Wealth increasingly has a human-skills rather than a fixed-capital basis.
Meanwhile, diversity is everywhere in the new economy organisation, and working
with culture in fact means working with diversity. Instead of Henry Fords assertion
in which individual customer needs are irrelevant because customers are all the
same, organisations now want to be close to customers, to find out what they really
want, and to service their needs in a way which works for them. Taking customer
service seriously inevitably means discovering that people are different, according to
various combinations of age, ethnic background, geographical location, sexual
orientation, interest, fashion, fad or fetish. Serving niche markets, this is called, and
systems of mass customisation are created at the point where high tech meets soft
touchsuch as the e-commerce systems or hotel registration procedures which
build up the profile of a customer, and their precise needs and interests.
Then, theres the diversity within the organisation. Teams work with high levels
of interpersonal contact, and work best, not when the members are forced to share
the same values, but when differencesof interest, association, network, knowledge,
experience, lifestyle and languages spokenare respected and used as a source of
creativity, or as a link into the myriad of niches in the world in which the
organisation has to operate. This world of diversity exists both at the local level of
increasingly multicultural societies, and at the global level where distant and different markets, products and organisations become, in a practical sense, closer and
closer (Cope & Kalantzis, 1997).
We are in the midst of a technology revolution, moreover, which not only changes
the way we work but also the way we participate as citizens. From the old world of
broadcasting to the new world of narrowcasting, consider what has happened to
22
M. Kalantzis et al.
24
M. Kalantzis et al.
In Australia, for example, all state education ministers have recently introduced annual
statewide year 7 literacy and numeracy tests, though Victoria provides sample testing only
(Honeywood, 2002). In the USA, the position of President Bush is clear: Children must
be tested every year in reading and math, every single year (Bush, 2001).
REFERENCES
AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL OF DEANS OF EDUCATION (2001) New Learning: a charter for Australian
Education (Canberra, ACDE).
BUSH, G. (2001) Announcement of Education Bill (1st bill sent to Congress), Jan 23, cited at
http://www.issues2000.org/GeorgeWBush.htm#Education (accessed 25 May 2002)
COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (2000) A Memorandum on Lifelong Learning, Commission staff working paper, 30 October, Brussels.
26
M. Kalantzis et al.
COPE, B. & FREEMAN, R. (Eds) (2001) Digital Rights Management and Content Development,
Technology Drivers Across the Book Production Supply Chain, From the Creator to the Consumer
(Melbourne, Common Ground).
COPE, B. & GOLLINGS, G. (Eds) (2001) Multilingual Book Production, Technology Drivers Across the
Book Production Supply Chain, From the Creator to the Consumer (Melbourne, Common
Ground).
COPE, B. & KALANTZIS, M. (Eds) (1993) The Powers of Literacy: genre approaches to teaching writing
(London/Pittsburgh, PA, Falmer Press/University of Pennsylvania Press).
COPE, B. & KALANTZIS, M. (1997) Productive Diversity: a new approach to work and management
(Sydney, Pluto).
COPE, B. & KALANTZIS, M. (2000) Multicultural Education: an equity framework: South Australian
Department of Education Curriculum Standards and Accountability Framework (Adelaide,
South Australia Department of Education).
COPE, B. & MASON, D. (Eds) (2001) Creator to Consumer in a Digital Age: book production in
transition (Melbourne, Common Ground).
GEE, J. (2000) New people in new worlds: networks, the new capitalism and schools, in: B. COPE
& M. KALANTZIS, (Eds) Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures (London, Routledge).
GEE, J., HULL, G. & LANKSHEAR, C. (1996) The New Work Order (Boulder, CO, Westview).
GILSTER, P. (1997) Digital Literacy (New York, John Wiley & Sons).
GONCZI, A. (2002) Teaching and Learning of the Key Competencies, paper presented to De Se
Co conference 2002, University of Technology Sydney, 1113 February.
HONEYWOOD, P. (2002) School standards: what the Liberals would do, in: The Age, 31 May,
p. 13.
ISTANCE, D. (2001) Teachers, quality and schools in the future: an international perspective, in:
K. J. KENNEDY (Ed.) College Year Book, (ACT, Australian College of Education).
KALANTZIS, M. & COPE, B. 1(999) Multicultural education: transforming the mainstream, in: S.
MAY (Ed.) Critical Multiculturalism: rethinking multicultural and anti-racist education (London,
Falmer/Taylor & Francis).
LO BIANCO, J. (2000) Multiliteracies and multilingualism, in: B. COPE & M. KALANTZIS (Eds)
Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures (London, Routledge).
LUKE, C. (2000) Cyber-schooling and technological change: multiliteracies for new times, in: B.
COPE & M. KALANTZIS (Eds) Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures
(London, Routledge).
MITCHELL, W. (1995) City of Bits: space, place and the infobahn (Cambridge MA, MIT Press).
NAKATA, M. (2000) History, cultural diversity and English language teaching, in B. COPE & M.
KALANTZIS (Eds) Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures (London,
Routledge).
NEW LONDON GROUP (1996) A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures, Harvard
Educational Review, 66 (1), pp. 6092.
RAMSEY, G. (2000) Quality MattersRevitalising Teaching: critical times, critical choices, Report of
the Review of Teacher Education (New South Wales, Department of Education and
Training).