Multiliteracies for the digital era
8 05 2007Building on the arguments advanced by Tama Leaver, I’d like to suggest that when thinking about digital literacy, we can learn a great deal from work currently being carried out in the broader area of multiliteracies.
A lot of recent work in the field of literacy, particularly the New Literacy Studies, has seen a move away from the idea that Literacy is “a single thing with a big L and a single Y” (Brian Street, cited in Wilson 2000) and a realisation that it varies from context to context, giving rise to the notion of literacies. David Barton and Mary Hamilton (2000) have identified three ways in which the term has to be seen as plural: firstly, literacy practices may involve different media and semiotic systems (such as films or computers); secondly, “practices in different cultures and languages can be regarded as different literacies”; and thirdly, literacy practices may be associated with particular domains of life (such as academic or workplace literacy). While much of Barton and Hamilton’s work focuses on the third of these, the first two issues have been highlighted by the New London Group and others who reject traditional print-based literacy pedagogy with its focus on “formalised, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (New London Group, 2000). Instead, it is argued that there is a need for a pedagogy of multiliteracies which takes into account both “our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalised societies” as well as “the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies”.
It’s also worth considering the work of Suresh Canagarajah (2003) who, taking a postmodern slant on the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), writes of “fluid literacies”:
[Our] students desire equal facility in English and their national languages. We cannot teach them English literacy without relevance to the other languages they use in their everyday life. (To do this, we don’t have to be proficient in those languages.) The reality of hybrid texts and fluid literacies increases the possibility that these languages will find equal yet mixed functionality in many contexts of postmodern communication. With the boundedness and self-confinement of the nation gradually eroding as the global seeps into the local, one might question whether we can have an exclusive “national” policy on anything anymore without being sensitive to the pressures and pulls of the international. Accommodating diverse languages/dialects in education is not a compassion we show for minority students; it is becoming a matter of economic necessity even for monolingual students from dominant social groups.
The value of this metaphor is in adding to the pluralisation already inherent in “literacies” the notion of fluidity, which suggests not only seepage across ever more permeable boundaries between nations, communities, languages and cultures, but the possibility of mixing and hybridisation.
What all of this work on multiliteracies suggests is that we need to conceive of a multilteracies paradigm which has at least two major strands: it is multimodal (including, for example, digital literacies) and is potentially also multilingual or at least multidialectal. There’s no doubt that the web is becoming more multilingual and multicultural than ever before; initiating students into web literacy may therefore involve not just the crossing of boundaries between modes of communication, but also a willingness to work across dialects and languages. That represents a significant challenge for educators.
References:
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Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (2000) Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton and R. Ivanič (eds) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (pp.7-15). London: Routledge.
Canagarajah, S. (2003) Foreword. In G. Smitherman and V. Villanueva (eds) Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice (pp.ix-xiv). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
The New London Group. (2000) A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds) Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (pp.9-37). London: Routledge.
Wilson, A. (2000) There is no escape from third-space theory: Borderland discourse and the in-between literacies of prisons. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton and R. Ivanič (eds) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (pp.54-69). London: Routledge.
Mark, I think you’re quick right about the need for multimodal literacies (and projects like Oz in 30 Seconds show how important multimodal literacies are in terms of allowing literate citizens - and I don’t just means students here - to participate in the political discussions). I also concur on the need for thinking about literacies as encompassing multiple languages and/or dialects; I fear this is a much harder idea to promote in a rather mono-linguistic (or perceived to be mono-linguistic) culture such as Australia, but all the more important given that resistance!
If you’ll forgive one pedantic qualifier, though: despite supporting the idea, I’m not such a fan of ‘multiliteracies’ as a term. I guess one of the things that I like about ‘digital literacy’ or ‘network literacy’ is at least it explains the specific challenge - reforming the teaching of literacy (in the broad sense) to deal with the challenges of either digital or network communication and composition. I guess I might be overstating the point about multiliteracies - but it’s projects like Production and Research in Transliteracy (PART) and terms a proliferation on other terms like transliteracy which, I fear, might result in a lot of time being used in defining and arguing about definitions (and least no one’s using post-literacy yet … as far as I know). I should say, though, that I think PART as doing interesting and useful work, I’m just being uber-picky on the terminology!
Hi Tama,
I take your point about the proliferation of similar-sounding terms. Actually, “transliteracy” was a new one to me! However, I think it’s often the case that when new ground is being broken a variety of names and terms may be in circulation, but eventually we’ll end up with just one or two through an emerging consensus.
That said, multiliteracies is not the same as digital or network literacy. Mulitlieracies is much broader, encompassing everything from video and audio literacy through to digital/network literacy (multimodal literacies), and possibly also cultural and intercultural literacies (multilingual/-cultural literacies). I think in this case it’s important that we can distinguish between the catch-all term multiliteracies, and the individual types of literacy which are seen to compose it.
Hi Again Mark,
Reading back over my first response, and your additional comments, with a full night’s sleep behind me, I completely take your point. Moreover, I think you’re quite right that we can work under the broad umbrella of multiliteracies, while focusing of expanding literacy in a specific way, while slowly (and alongside the work of many others) forcing the bounds of ‘literacy’ to expand to the point where our entire discussion becomes moot … Literacy will mean digital, network, multimodal and multilinguistic by practice and by definition! (By then, of course, there will no doubt be new challenges and new literacies to think about!)