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Reflections on Reading Cope and Kalantzis' “'Multiliteracies': New

Literacies, New Learning”
James Paul Geea
a
Arizona State University,

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New Learning”', Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4: 3, 196 — 204
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 Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4: 196–204, 2009
Copyright © 2009 Taylor & Francis
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DOI: 10.1080/15544800903076077
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Reflections on Reading Cope and Kalantzis’

1554-4818 An International Journal,
1554-480X
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Pedagogies: Journal Vol. 4, No. 3, June 2009: pp. 1–17

“‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies,

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New Learning”
James Paul Gee
Reflections on Cope and Kalantzis
Gee

Arizona State University

This paper offers what is meant to be a long footnote to Bill Cope and Mary
Kalantzis’ paper, “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning”. The footnote
is about my perspective on learning and how that perspective has developed from
and since the New London Group meetings. At the same time, I reflect on particular
aspects of the first New London Group meeting; for example, the important role the
notion of design played, from a perspective of looking back now, many years later.

INTRODUCTION

I have nothing to add to—or, indeed, to critique in—Bill Cope and Mary
Kalantzis’ masterful paper, “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning”.
All I have to offer here is a footnote on learning. Many years have passed since
the New London meetings. In those meetings, a group of people—for the most
part baby boomers (like myself) or older—saw pretty well into the future of liter-
acy. However, the digital age, more fully on us now than then, would suggest the
need for a new New London Group composed of much younger scholars. We
were scholars who, though steeped personally and professionally in traditional
and academic literacy, were nonetheless committed to seeing literacy as multiple.
Literacy needed to be viewed as embedded in multiple socially and culturally
constructed practices, not seen as a uniform set of mental abilities or processes.

Correspondence should be sent to James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of
Literacy Studies, Division of Curriculum and Instruction, Mary Lou Fulton College of Education,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85284, USA. E-mail: james.gee@asu.edu
 REFLECTIONS ON COPE AND KALANTZIS 197

Indeed, some of us thought that literacy was often best studied by not focusing on
it directly, but on the social and cultural practices that always contain “other
stuff” instead: elements such as values and ways of acting, interacting and using
various tools and technologies, as well as meaningful objects, spaces and tempo-
ral relations (Gee, 2008). Literacy, whether in an urban gang, a US court room or
in a high-school biology class, is always fully intertwined with this other stuff.
Of course, by 1996 media and digital technologies had already ensured that
printed words were almost always accompanied by images—both static and
moving—as well as often sounds. Literacy was already largely a multimodal
affair. As the digital age proceeded, it became clear that just as traditional literacy
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was composed of ways of giving and getting meanings from written words, there
were many distinctive ways of giving and getting meanings from digital media
like websites, video games or machinima. There were digital literacies, but these
were most often multimodal and incorporated oral and/or written language. They
were not uniform or general but needed to be studied inside specific social
practices (e.g., the machinima for a guild website for World of War Craft).

THE SOCIAL MIND

So here, all I have to offer are notes from a now yet older baby boomer, and
reflections on where I went from the New London Group, in part as a result of
those meetings and the people in them. At the New London meetings, we
stressed the notion of design as an active process in which people invented,
re-invented and put to use the grammatical and discourse resources of their lan-
guage(s) and other sign systems to make meaning. Grammar was thus a toolkit
for active meaning making. People, as Gunther Kress stressed in those meetings,
actively invent and re-invent signs that are adequate for their purposes, and they
do not just recover fixed structures and meanings from a storehouse in their
minds. This notion of design came partly in response to the then current
controversies being caused by the genre movement in Australia—an important
backdrop to the meetings (Christie, 1990; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Martin,
1991). However, more importantly, it came as a way for people in the meetings,
who were from different linguistic traditions, to talk in common about and think
about grammar and its role both in society and the future.
Of course, people in the meetings came at the notion of design itself from dif-
ferent perspectives. In those days, as a sociolinguist who had studied language
and literacy from a sociocultural perspective, I had just begun to see that much of
the work in this vein had left learning out of the picture. This was largely due to
the fact that such work—work I had called The New Literacy Studies in 1980s (see
Gee, 1989 a collection based on work from earlier in the 1980s)—was, in part, a
negative reaction to traditional psychology. Traditional views in psychology
 198 GEE

looked at knowledge in terms of mental representations stored in the head (the

mind or brain). The New Literacy Studies—and much related work—wanted to
look at knowledge not as an individual mental attribute, but as embedded in and
constructed from social and cultural practices.
While I was very much interested in arguing that language, mind and knowl-
edge are all socially and culturally produced and re-produced achievements, at
the time of the first New London meeting I had just begun to feel that we also
needed an account of learning, especially if we were to intervene in educational
debates and controversies. Psychology had changed over the years and alterna-
tive views had arisen to oppose the traditional view. These alternatives were
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based on a variety of related but different approaches to knowledge and learning

stemming from research on situated cognition.
The traditional view of knowledge and learning is, of course, a view of the
mind (e.g., Newell, 1990). But it is closely connected to a viewpoint on language
as well. In traditional work, the meaning of a word is a general concept in the
head that can be spelled out in something like a definition (although this would
be a definition in the head in some form of mental language). For example, the
word bachelor might be represented by a complex concept in the head that the
following definition might, at least in part, capture: a male who is not married. At
the time of the New London Group’s first meeting, there were, of course, already
challenges to this view, even in psychology. There are yet better challenges to it
today. Consider, for instance, these two quotes from some relatively recent work
in cognitive psychology:
. . . comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for
situated action. (Barsalou, 1999a, p. 77)
. . . to a particular person, the meaning of an object, event, or sentence is what
that person can do with the object, event, or sentence. (Glenberg, 1997, p. 3)
These two quotes are from work that is part of a family of related viewpoints
which, for want of a better name, we might call the situated cognition family.
This means that these viewpoints all hold that thinking is connected to and
changes across actual situations and is not always or usually a process of apply-
ing abstract generalizations, definitions, or rules (e.g., Barsalou, 1999a, 1999b;
Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Clancey, 1997; Clark, 1997, 2003; Engeström,
Miettinen, & Punamaki, 1999; Gee, 1992; Glenberg, 1997; Glenberg & Robertson,
1999; Hutchins, 1995; Latour, 1999, 2005; Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991;
Wertsch, 1998; Wenger, 1998).
Although there are differences among the different members of this family,
they share the viewpoint that language and thinking are tied to people’s experi-
ences of situated action in the material and social world. Furthermore, these
experiences are stored in the mind/brain not in terms of language (propositions),
but in terms of something like dynamic images tied to perceptions both of the
 REFLECTIONS ON COPE AND KALANTZIS 199

world and of our own bodies, and of internal states and feelings. Increasing evi-
dence suggests that perceptual simulation is indeed central to comprehension
(Barsalou, 1999a, p. 74).
This approach to meaning in language began to influence me a good deal after
the first New London meeting, perhaps influenced by that meeting and especially
by Kress’s dramatic claim that we always make (not just reproduce) signs on the
spot adequate to our desired meaning. Yet later I became interested in video
games and learning. My interest in video games has led me to create a metaphor
to make clear what the situated viewpoint on language means, using concepts
drawn from the realm of video games (Gee, 2003, 2004, 2007).
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Video games such as Deus Ex, Half-Life, Age of Mythology, Rise of Nations or
Neverwinter Nights involve a visual and auditory world in which a player manip-
ulates a virtual character. Such games often come with editors or other sorts of
software with which the player can make changes to the game world or even
build a whole new game world. The player can create a new landscape, a new set
of buildings or new characters. S/he can set up the world so that certain types of
actions are allowed or disallowed. The player is building a new world by not just
using but modifying the original visual images (in fact, the code for them) that
came with the game.
One simple example of this is the way in which players can build new skate-
board parks in the game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Players must place ramps,
trees, grass, poles and other items in a virtual space so that they or other players
can manipulate their virtual characters to skateboard in this park in a fun and
challenging way. Through this act, the player can create problems that other
players must solve in order to skate in the park successfully.
Imagine the human mind works in a similar way. We have acquired experi-
ences in this world, including things we have experienced in dialogue with
others. As an example, let us use experiences of weddings. These are our raw
materials, like the game with which the gamer starts. Based on these experiences,
we can build a simulated model of a wedding. We can move around as a charac-
ter in the model but retaining our own identity, imaging our role in the wedding,
or we can play other characters at the wedding (e.g., the minister), imaging what
it is like to be that person.
The simulation we build is not neutral, with no particular perspective; rather,
it is meant to take a perspective on weddings. It foregrounds certain aspects of
weddings that we view as important or salient. It backgrounds other elements that
we think are less important or less salient and leaves some things out altogether.
However, we do not build just one wedding simulation and store it away once
and for all in our minds. Rather, we build different simulations on the spot for
different specific contexts in which we find ourselves. In a given situation or con-
versation involving weddings, we build a simulation that fits that context and
helps us to make sense of it. Our simulations are specially built to help us make
 200 GEE

sense of the specific situations we are in, conversations we are having or texts we
are reading. In one case, we might build a simulation that emphasizes weddings
as fun, blissful and full of potential for a long and happy future. In another case,
we might build a simulation that emphasizes weddings as complex, stressful and
full of potential for problematic futures.
We build our simulations to help us make sense of things and prepare for
action in the real world. We can act in the simulation and test which conse-
quences will follow before we act in the real world. We can role-play other
people in the model and try to see what motivates their actions or could follow
from those actions before we respond to them in the real world. In fact, human
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beings tend to want to understand objects and words in terms of their affordances
for action. Take something as simple as a glass:
The meaning of the glass to you, at [a] particular moment, is in terms of the actions
available. The meaning of the glass changes when different constraints on action
are combined. For example, in a noisy room, the glass may become a mechanism
for capturing attention (by tapping it with a spoon), rather than a mechanism for
quenching thirst. (Glenberg, 1997, p. 41)
Faced with the word glass in a text or a glass in a specific situation, the word
or object takes on a specific meaning or significance based not just on the simula-
tion we build but also on the actions with the glass that we see as salient in the
simulation. In one case, we might build a simulation in which the glass is for
drinking with, in another it is for ringing like a bell to get attention, and in
another it may be a precious heirloom in a museum that is not meant to be
touched. Our simulations stress affordances for action so that they can prepare us
to act or not act in appropriate ways in the real world.
We think and prepare for action with and through our simulations. They are
what we use to give meaning to our experiences in the world, and they prepare us
for action in the world. They help us give meaning to words and sentences, yet
they are not language. Furthermore, because they are representations of
experience (including feelings, attitudes, embodied positions and various sorts of
foregroundings and backgroundings of attention), they are not just pieces of
information or facts. Rather, they are value-laden, perspective-taking games in
the mind. I call them games because we have avatars (representations of
ourselves or others as actors) and goals in these simulations in our minds, just as
in video games.
Of course, talking about simulations in the mind is a metaphor that, like all
metaphors, is incorrect if pushed too far (see Barsalou, 1999b, for how a similar
metaphor was cashed out and corrected by the consideration of a more neurally
realistic framework for the concept of perception in the mind). However, in fact,
work on neuroscience is beginning to suggest that this metaphor is very close,
indeed, to how we humans work.
 REFLECTIONS ON COPE AND KALANTZIS 201

Thus, meaning is not about general definitions in the head. It is about building
specific simulations for specific contexts. Even words that seem to have very
clear definitions, such as the word bachelor, are not really so clear cut. Meaning
is not just about definitions but also about simulations of experience. For example,
consider what simulation(s) you would bring to a situation in which someone said
of a woman: “She’s the bachelor of the group.” You might build a simulation in
which the woman was attractive, at or a little older than marriageable age, per-
haps a bit drawn to the single life and afraid of marriage but open to possibilities.
You would see yourself as acting in various ways toward the woman and see her
responding in various ways. The fact that this woman is obviously not an unmar-
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ried man would not stop you from giving meaning to this utterance. Someone
else, having had different experiences from you, would form a different sort of
simulation. Perhaps the differences between your simulation and the other
person’s would be big, or perhaps they might be small. They could be small if
you and that person have had similar experiences (and have similar values) in life
and larger if you have not.
If we admit the importance of the ability to simulate experiences in order to
comprehend oral and written language, we can see the importance of supplying
all children in school with the range of necessary experiences with which they
can build good and useful simulations for understanding subjects such as science.
Nearly everyone will have experiences of weddings and bachelors sufficient for
building simulations with which to think and prepare for action. However, not all
learners may have adequate experience with concepts such as reflection and
refraction, atoms and molecules or force and motion that will allow them to build
simulations that can serve for thinking and meaning in science.
As an aside, let me point out that anyone who knows the history of linguistics will
know that the viewpoint I have just discussed is a dressed-up, modern, up-to-date
version of much older views in linguistic semantics—views that, indeed, have
influenced (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) this more modern work in
a different field (Fillmore, 1975).
One issue that arises when we think of meaning as situated in actual experi-
ences people have had is generality. Of course, generality is important, but in a
situated viewpoint it is often (and sometimes best) attained, at least initially, from
the bottom up by comparing and contrasting various specific experiences that can
then serve as materials for building simulations that apply more generally to a
domain. Let us consider a specific example—one that will begin to introduce the
role of digital technologies. The science educator Andrea diSessa (2000) has suc-
cessfully taught the algebra behind Galileo’s principles of motion (principles
related to Newton’s laws) to children in the sixth grade and beyond using a
specific computer programming language called Boxer.
The students type into a computer a set of discrete steps in the programming
language. For example, the first command in a simple program meant to
 202 GEE

represent uniform motion might tell the computer to set the speed of a moving
object at one metre per second. The second step might tell the computer to move
the object and a third step might tell the computer to repeat the second step over
and over. Once the program starts running, the student will see a graphical object
move one metre each second repeatedly—a form of uniform motion.
The student can then elaborate the model in various ways. For example, s/he
might add a fourth step that tells the computer to add a value a to the speed of the
moving object after each movement the object has taken (let us say, for conve-
nience, that a adds one more metre per second at each step). Now, after the first
movement on the screen (when the object moved at a speed of one metre per
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second), the computer will set the speed of the object at two metres per second
(adding one metre), and, then, for the next movement, the object will move at a
speed of two metres per second.
After this, the computer will add another metre per second to the speed, and
for the next movement, the object will move at a speed of three metres per
second. This will repeat forever, unless the student has added a step that tells the
computer when to stop repeating the movements. This process is obviously
modelling the concept of acceleration. Of course, you could set a to be a negative
number instead of a positive one and watch what happens to the moving object
over time instead.
The student can keep elaborating the program and watch what happens at
every stage. In the process, the student, with the guidance of a good teacher, can
discover a good deal about Galileo’s principles of motion through his or her own
actions in writing the program, watching what happens and changing the
program. The student is seeing, in an embodied way, tied to action, how a repre-
sentational system that is less abstract than algebra or calculus (namely, a simple
computer programming language, which is actually composed of a set of boxes)
cashes out in a virtual world on the computer screen.
An algebraic representation of Galileo’s principles would be far more general
than such a representational system. It would involve a set of numbers and
variables that would not directly tie to the actual actions or movements of mate-
rial objects. As diSessa (2000) points out, algebra does not distinguish effectively
“among motion (d = rt), converting meters to inches (i = 39.37 × m), defining
coordinates of a straight line (y = mx), or a host of other conceptually varied
situations” (pp. 32–33). They all look alike. He goes on to point out that “[d]istin-
guishing these contexts is critical in learning, although it is probably nearly irrel-
evant in fluid, routine work for experts,” (ibid., p. 33) who, of course, have
already had many embodied experiences using algebra for a variety of different
purposes of their own.
Once learners have experienced the meanings of Galileo’s principles about
motion in a situated and embodied way, they would have begun to understand
one of the situated meanings for the algebraic equations that capture these
 REFLECTIONS ON COPE AND KALANTZIS 203

principles at a more abstract level. These equations would then have begun to
take on real meanings in terms of embodied understandings. As learners see alge-
bra spelled out in additional specific material situations, they will come to master
it in an active and critical way and not just as a set of symbols to be repeated in a
passive and rote manner on tests. As diSessa puts it:
Programming turns analysis into experience and allows a connection between
analytic forms and their experiential implications that algebra and even calculus
can’t touch. (diSessa, 2000, p. 34)

Abstract systems originally got their meanings through such embodied experi-
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ences for those who really understand them. Abstraction (at least in many important
cases) rises gradually out of the ground of situated meaning and practice, and returns
there from time to time, or else they would be meaningless to most human beings.
This long discussion of diSessa’s work has a point: it is a good example of how
today’s digital tools can “externalize” the mind. I have argued that people have
experiences, they store these experiences in their minds and then they “mod” them
(a gamer term, meaning to edit and modify) to prepare for action and problem
solving in new experiences. However, digital tools such as Boxer and video game
technologies can create external goal-based simulations that humans can use—
alone or together collaboratively—to enhance thinking and problem solving.
These tools do in the external world what we do internally in our heads all the
time. In that sense, they render thinking yet more public, social and interactive.
However, it should immediately be pointed out that the view of the mind,
thinking and language that I have developed here—as mental simulations based
on actual experiences—is already fully social. This is a point regularly missed by
people who engage in sociocultural work. The situated viewpoint that I have
sketched out here claims that people think through their actual experiences, but
that these experiences are edited in the head to express certain perspectives (to
foreground certain elements and background others) as we build simulations for
action and various purposes. However, the experiences people have and how they
edit (or interpret) them are founded in a social, interactive, public exterior world.
The social groups and Discourses to which they belong teach them how to have
and modify these experiences (how else could they learn?); they help to norm the
experiences people have. These groups and Discourses police their use of their
experiences for actions, goals and projects in the real world. The mind is a social
mind. This is why people from similar groups or Discourses can, in a certain time
and place, have similar minds—similar enough to communicate, interact, and col-
laborate (and this, thus, solves a major problem in the philosophy of language).
This was the point of my book The Social Mind (Gee, 1992)—a book that was
written at the time of the first New London Group. Thus, the argument is that
even if we start with a view of the mind, we end up still in the world of social and
cultural practices and Discourses.
 204 GEE

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