Pedagogies for Digital Learning: From Transpositional Grammar to the Literacies of Education

This chapter explores the potentials of digital learning, exploring five principles for what we call a “reflexive pedagogy” – learning that is sociable, engaged, deep, recursive, and equitable. These return us to old ideals for education and programs of reform that have long been the subject of careful consideration. Despite repeated attempts for more than a century, however, the reforms have mostly failed. They will fail again in the era of digital media if our e-learning systems merely replicate and fossilize didactic pedagogies. Applying concepts from our transpositional grammar, we have parsed the communicative artifacts of didactic and reflexive pedagogy. We use this framework to explore the potentials for reflexive pedagogy in the era of digitally mediated, multimodal meaning. We argue that educational changes that were harder to achieve before digitally mediated meaning are now possible.