Multiliteracies in Motion: Current theory & practice

Language and Literacy

In the digital era, students are walking new literacy paths. For this reason, there is a need to explore evolving literacy practices in school pedagogy. This is often addressed by the expanding use of the concept of multiliteracies. This article reviews studies (N=68) concentrating on multiliteracies pedagogy. The main aim was to study how has the concept of multiliteracies been used and understood in primary classroom research. The results indicate that the studies often took into account both the multimodality of meaning-making and the diversity of learners. Recommendations are made for future multiliteracies studies to strengthen the pedagogical practices.

2017

This study examined the knowledge, dispositions, beliefs, experiences, and educational practices of six literacy teacher educators, from three countries, who enacted a multiliteracies approach to teaching. In this qualitative study, three semi-structured interviews were conducted of each participant over a three year period. Four significant findings emerged. First, these literacy teacher educators held a broad, holistic, and evolving conceptualization of literacy that was not limited to a notion of literacy as a set of autonomous skills (e.g., reading and writing). This conceptualization included a range of multimodal communications: print-based literacies, artsbased experiences, and digital practices. Second, all of the literacy teacher educators designed coherent courses that were driven by a single overarching purpose (e.g., developing a broad and inclusive understanding of literacy and literacy practices). The overarching purpose was realized through17 specific goals and purpos...

International Handbook of English Language Teaching, 2007

The conceptual and epistemological grounds of literacy are being stretched as the encoded worlds we navigate increasingly interpenetrate multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal contexts. The twenty-first century finds us at a critical juncture for reevaluating English language and literacy teaching agendas. The technological revolution has facilitated and augmented human communication such that everyday interactions now essentially include digital interfaces. Language, text, and discourse norms and practices are being rapidly expanded and reinvented in response to new media and global networks. The language driving the majority of intercultural web traffic is English, which reinforces its position as a global language and adds an insidious dimension of cybercolonialism. Teachers are in crisis: domains for English language socialization now extend from known geographical and social contexts to the global panorama of the virtual world in which we, too, are learners. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have created new literacies that are required by learners of all ages if they are to fairly contend for academic and economic success. This chapter examines the evolution of literacy into multiliteracies and considers how this epistemological shift affects ELT. Digitally responsive, pedagogically strategic, ecologically sensitive English language and literacy teaching and learning practices are discussed in conclusion.

Journal of Classroom Interaction

In this paper we present findings from an empirical study-in-progress that investigates how a teacher integrates technology, specifically an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB), to teach multiliterate practices when reading multi-modal texts. This research was a collaboration between a teacher and a team of university-based researchers as they used ethnographic action research to make visible the teacher's espoused and enacted beliefs as to what counts as multiliteracies in her classroom during the exploratory first phase of the inquiry. Social constructionism framed our theoretical orientation and our epistemological view of knowledge. Data based on observations, field notes, reflective journal entries, videotapes and cultural artifacts were analyzed from contrastive and holistic perspectives using micro-analytic techniques to interpret ways that meanings were negotiated when reading a multi-modal text on an IWB. Results reported indicate lack of congruence between the teacher's espoused and enacted beliefs, given that her practices focused mainly on traditional print-based modes of communication. These findings will inform the teacher's action in the next phase of the study where ethnographic action research methods will guide the teacher's planning in ways that will align her espoused and enacted beliefs about multiliteracies, multimodal texts and the use of the IWB in her classroom.

2014

This research report explores the relationship between two literacy curriculum reform projects, one global and the other local, which emerged at the same time. The former is the Multiliteracies approach, which is based on the concept of multiple literacies, the latter is the new language and literacy curriculum in South Africa. Taking the form of constructive comparative textual analysis, which shows how the local and global approaches to literacy pedagogy under examination articulate with each other, the research report aims to extend rather than criticise the work of South African curriculum designers. The research report argues that the local literacy curriculum reform initiative lacks a coherent theoretical framework, and therefore does not provide the foundational principles which are required for guiding implementation of what is seen as a paradigm shift in literacy education in South Africa, It proposes that since the Multiliteracies approach offers an overarching theory of t...

2005

Over the past two decades, following the publication and widespread take-up of the New London Group's landmark call to action: A pedagogy of multiliteracies, teachers, researchers, and policy makers have been refocusing teaching and learning for an emergent global society that is interconnected in real time and space, and, simultaneously, in a virtual dimension that was only vaguely perceived in 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies signalled the pressing need to lift the concept of literacy off the linguistically and technologically restricted page towards complex, hybridized multimedia literacies that spill across the ephemeral borders of education, literacy, second language acquisition, media literacy, cultural studies, and applied linguistics. As the static, unidirectional 2D world on paper has disintegrated into dynamic, multidirectional, crowd-sourced, cloud-based knowledge construction, individually measurable reading-writing-listening-speaking skills have given way to cognitively-distributed problem-solving, using a digital toolkit enabling collaborative R/W authoring; plurilingual and multimodal design; ludic and maker pedagogies; even post-human communication with bots. In this wildly changing communication landscape, interdisciplinarity is an essential coping mechanism. In 2002, I walked into an inner city elementary school in northwest Toronto as a researcher, wanting to understand how multiliteracies were reshaping the coalface of emergent literacy. They weren't, but the principal was keen to understand how to improve learning for a 90% immigrant population. The school had a mandate to use what was then naively described as technology to boost the chances of success for children who were poor, and had little, if any, knowledge of English, much less of the cultural complexities of Canadian identity. Through shared " how do we do this? " problem-solving, we formed a small school-university working group to try out new ideas for bringing children's linguistic and cultural knowledge—their funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992)—into digital cross-curricular literacy projects. As our learning community grew, it became a regular theory-practice workshop timetabled into the school day, where a core of dedicated educators and researchers met to plan, and conduct pedagogical interventions across classes, grades, and subjects to inject the languages of the community into digitally-supported, multimodal projects (see: Lotherington, 2011). Over a decade, we rewrote literacy education, school culture, and our own understandings of learning, responding in the process to challenges about how to teach a class of 25 children speaking 16 different languages, and how to cope with the incessant rate of technological change. This presentation describes our dialogic learning process, and pedagogical experimentation, and showcases a sample of elementary school children's beautiful plurilingual, multimodal products.

Wright/The Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education, 2015

This paper is based on a qualitative study examining multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996 and inclusivity. Underpinned by a socio-cultural approach, the study examined ways to facilitate meaningful literacy learning for students experiencing challenges in print-based, classroom activities. Key to this research was an analysis of how scaffolding was used to bridge home and school communities. This paper focuses on one of the study's students, Hannah, who exhibited extensive engagement with multiliteracies at home -driven through the Arts (e.g. graphic design, singing and music). In contrast, Hannah's literacy experiences in the classroom were, at times, challenging and considerably different to those with which she engaged at home. Featuring iMovies and audiobooks, a multimodal literacy program connected the home and classroom, facilitating Hannah's exploration of multimodality. Findings call for open-ended, flexible approaches to literacy education and a reinvigoration of initial teacher programs, to support diversity and inclusion in literacy education.

English Teaching Practice and Critique, 2010

Conceptions of literacy in the secondary English language arts classroom today have expanded in multiple directions, moving far beyond former emphases on reading comprehension and writing ability. This article presents the efforts of two secondary English language arts teachers in the Midwestern United States to expand the meaning of literacy in their own classrooms. Using a case study approach, the authors examine each teacher's understanding of literacy, views on enacting literacy in the classroom and efforts to engage students in multiliteracies. The authors then discuss the implications of the teachers' literacy work, focusing on the teachers' individual classrooms and the preparation of secondary English teachers.

2020