Introduction The work of learning and

teaching literacies

Old basics and new

The two ‘multis’ of multiliteracies

This book offers a ‘Multiliteracies’ approach to literacy. We coined this

term together with our colleagues in the New London Group during
discussions in which we were trying to capture some of the enormous shifts
in the ways in which people made and participated in meanings.1 The
Multiliteracies approach attempts to explain what still matters in traditional
approaches to reading and writing, and to supplement this with knowledge of
what is new and distinctive about the ways in which people make meanings
in the contemporary communications environment.
The term ‘Multiliteracies’ refers to two major aspects of meaning-making
today. The first is social diversity, or the variability of conventions of
meaning in different cultural, social or domain-specific situations. Texts
vary enormously depending on social context – life experience, subject
matter, disciplinary domain, area of employment, specialist knowledge,
cultural setting or gender identity, to name just a few key differences. These
differences are becoming ever more significant to the ways in which we
interact in our everyday lives, the ways in which we make and participate in
meanings. For this reason, it is important that literacy teaching today should
not primarily focus, as it did in the past, only on the rules of a single,
standard form of the national language.
Communication increasingly requires that learners are able to figure out
differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another and
communicate across these differences as their lives require. A doctor reads
different things and speaks differently from a patient to other doctors, yet
doctor and patient need to relate. A salesperson is an expert about a product
who can make sense of technical manuals, but also needs to be able to
explain something to a customer who may find reading an instruction
manual difficult. An interaction between two school friends on Facebook
will be very different from the history essay they write for school. All the
time, we move between different social spaces, with different social
languages. Negotiating these language differences and their patterns or
designs becomes a crucial aspect of literacy learning.
The second aspect of meaning-making highlighted by the idea of
Multiliteracies is multimodality. This is a particularly significant issue
today, in part as a result of the new information and communications media.
Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal – in which
written-linguistic modes of meaning interface with oral, visual, audio,
gestural, tactile and spatial patterns of meaning. Writing was once the main
way of making meanings across times and distances. Today, written modes
of meaning can be complemented by, or replaced by, other ways of crossing
time and distance, such as recordings and transmissions of oral, visual,
audio, gestural and other patterns of meaning. This means that we need to
extend the range of literacy pedagogy beyond alphabetical communication.
It also means that, in today’s learning environments, we need to supplement
traditional reading and writing skills with multimodal communications,
particularly those typical of the new, digital media. Our approach here is to
expand traditional understandings of the function and form of the written
word. We want to explore the broader range of ways in which literacy works
in contemporary society.

Fig. 0.1: The two ‘multis’ of Multiliteracies

Agendas of literacies

Our key questions in this book are:

• How do we enable all learners to make and participate in meanings that

will enable them, as children and later as adults, to be effective and
fulfilled members of society; to make a contribution to society
according to their interests and abilities; and to receive in return the
benefits society offers?
• How do we redress the ongoing and systemic inequalities in literacy
learning and broader educational outcomes for learners from different
backgrounds and with different dispositions?
• What and how do we teach in the context of enormous changes in the
modes and media of communication?
• How do we promote understandings about literacy relevant to our
 contemporary times when our ways of making meanings are changing
so radically?
• If literacy has traditionally been understood to be two of the three
‘basics’ (the proverbial three ‘r’s of reading, writing and arithmetic),
what might be considered ‘basic’ today?
• What is the continuing role of the traditional basics, and how do these
connect with ‘new basics’?
• How might these new basics engage more effectively with a broader
spectrum of learners?

The basics of old literacy learning involved elementary phonics to translate

the sounds of speech into the symbolic images of writing, and reading as a
process of decoding the meanings of written words. It focused on textual
formalities such as ‘correct’ spelling and grammar. It privileged a particular
form of speech and writing in the national language that was held up as the
unquestioned ‘standard’ or ‘educated’ form. It had students read to
appreciate the style of ‘good writing’, first in school ‘readers’ and later in
canonical texts considered to be of ‘literary’ value. Reading meant
‘comprehension’ of meanings that were thought, in a straightforward way, to
be intrinsic to texts and as intended by their authors. ‘Knowledge’ and
‘skills’ were demonstrated in tests as the successful acquisition of these
elements of literacy, by writing correctly or showing that one had read the
‘correct’ meanings written into texts by giving the right answers in multiple
choice comprehension tests.
The old basics produced people who were literate in a certain sense and
for a particular kind of society. However, from the perspective of today, this
traditional or heritage conception of literacy is in many respects too
narrowly focused. At worst, it seems decontextualised, abstract, rule-bound
and fragmented into formal components such as phonics, grammar and
literature. In its most rigid forms, this kind of literacy learning produced
(predictably for those times) compliant learners: people who would accept
what was presented to them as correct, and who passively learned knowledge
which could not easily be applied in different and new contexts.
If they did well at school, the students of this era became knowledgeable
in the sense that they recognised received rules and conventions. They
learned complicated spelling rules, or the grammar of adverbial clauses, or
the lines of great poets. This was a kind of knowledge – a moral lesson about
complying with the directives of received authority. It may well have
worked for the social settings of the time in which unquestioning
compliance was regarded as a good thing. A lot of students, however, didn’t
do so well at this kind of schooling, and when they found jobs that were
unskilled or menial, they could have blamed themselves and their ‘abilities’
for not having done better at school.
These heritage literacy teaching practices are not adequate on their own to
meet the needs of the today’s society and economy. This is not to say that
phonics, grammar and literary texts are unimportant – in fact, as we will
make the case in this book, they are just as important as ever. However, what
was taught was for some students sometimes not enough, and at other times
not terribly relevant or the highest priority for learning given today’s
functional, communicative needs. Nor, as we will see later in this book, are
some twentieth-century attempts at reform, such as progressive education or
‘authentic’ literacy pedagogy, which for all their optimistic idealism have
mostly had a negligible impact on the systemic inequalities reinforced by
education.
The more contemporary terms for the traditional three ‘r’s are ‘literacy’
and ‘numeracy’. Certainly, traditional mathematics, reading and writing are
today as important as ever – perhaps even more important. However, literacy
and numeracy can either stand as substitute words for the old basics, or they
can capture a broader understanding of communication and a more active
approach to learning.
We use the term ‘new basics’ to catch the flavour of a more contemporary,
relevant and inclusive approach to knowledge. Literacy is not simply a
matter of correct usage. It also is a means of communication and
representation of meanings in a broader, richer and all-encompassing sense.
If this is the case, the new communications environment presents challenges
to heritage literacy teaching practices, in which the old habits of literacy
teaching and learning need to be reconsidered and supplemented. For
example, we have to consider how we learn grammar and spelling in writing
environments supported by checking routines in writing software. Also,
contemporary sites of writing such as email messages, text messages and
social media posts are more fluid and open, creating new conventions of
writing.
In fact, the messages in these new writing spaces are often more like
speaking than writing. Some have even developed new and quirky
conventions which we learn as we go – abbreviations, friendly informalities,
emoticons and cryptic ‘in’ expressions – all of which take their place in the
new world of literacy. Increasingly, contemporary texts involve complex
relationships between visuals, space and the written word: the tens of
thousands of words in a supermarket; the written text around the screen on
the news, sports or business program on the television; the text of an ATM;
websites built on visual icons and active hypertext links; the subtle
relationships of images and text in glossy print magazines and news and
information delivered to e-book readers; and the hybrid oral-written-visual
texts of instant messaging and social networking sites.
Written texts are now designed in a highly visual way, and meaning is
carried as much multimodally as it is by the words and sentences of
traditional literacy. This means that teaching the traditional forms of
alphabetical literacy today needs to be skilfully supplemented by rigorous
learning about the multimodal design of texts.
We now have to learn how to navigate the myriad different uses of
language in different contexts: this particular email (personal, to a friend) in
contrast to that (applying for a job); this particular kind of desktop
publishing presentation (a newsletter for your sports group) in contrast to
that (a page of advertising); different uses of English as a global language
(in different English-speaking countries, by non-native speakers, by
different subcultural groups) in contrast to formal settings where certain
‘educated’ forms of the language are still used (such as scientific reports); in
indexes to reference books in contrast to web searches; or in writing a letter
in contrast to sending an email. So the capabilities of literacy involve not
only knowledge of formal conventions across a range of modes, but also
effective communication in diverse settings and the use of tools of text
design that are multimodal, rather than a reliance on the written mode alone.
These are the reasons why we have chosen to title this book ‘Literacies’ in
the plural. In the past, ‘literacy’ seemed enough. Today we need to be able to
navigate ‘literacies’.

Table 0.1: Old and new basics

Communication and representation

So far, we have mainly been speaking about communication, or the passing

of a message from person to person. However, literacies are more than that;
they are also about thinking, or a phenomenon that we want to call
‘representation’. We use literacies to make meanings for ourselves –
silently, as we talk to ourselves using the concepts that language provides us,
as we formulate arguments in our heads, as we write notes, as we create
mental images, as we conceive things in diagrams, as we make models.
Nobody need ever hear or see what our representations are, but we use
language, and visualisation and bodily movement in space, in order to think
and to make meanings for ourselves, to make sense of our worlds.

Fig. 0.2: Representation and communication

 More than simply being a business of communicating competently and
appropriately in contemporary social settings, the new basics are also about
what we have called a ‘new learning’.2 Literacy, for instance, involves rules
and their appropriate application. Literacies are additionally about the
challenge of being faced with an unfamiliar kind of text and being able to
search for clues about its meaning without the barrier of feeling alienated by
it and excluded from it. They are also about understanding how a text works
so you can participate in its meanings (engaging its own particular ‘rules’).
They are about working out the particular context and purposes of the text
(and here you will find more clues about its meaning to the communicator
and to you). They are about ways of seeing and thinking (representation) as
much as they are about creating meaningful and effective messages
(communication). Finally, literacies are about approaching communication
in an unfamiliar context and learning from your successes and mis-steps as
you navigate new social spaces and encounter new social languages. These
are some of the more expansive and more flexible elements of the ‘new
basics’.
In the most general of senses, education is always about creating ‘kinds of
people’. The old basics were about people who learned rules and obeyed
them; people who passively accepted the answers to the world that had been
provided to them by ‘authorities’, rather than regarding the world as many
problems to be solved; and people who carried supposed correct information
and rules in their heads. The new basics enable new ‘kinds of people’:
people better adapted to the kind of world we live in now and the world of
the near future. These people will be flexible and collaborative learners.
They will be problem-solvers, broadly knowledgeable and capable of
applying divergent ways of thinking. They will be more discerning in the
context of much more and ever-changing complexity. They will be
innovative, creative risk-takers.
Forming people with these capacities requires not just new contents for
literacy teaching but also new pedagogies, or ways of teaching. In fact, it is
the contention of this book that literacy learning will increasingly need to
focus on enabling these kinds of people, people who are able to move
comfortably between the many literacies of work, public and community
life; able to communicate through multiple and changing media, and not just
people who are in command of only their own specific dialect or social
language, nor a rigid and culturally specific body of rules for ‘proper’
communication that in the past was called ‘literacy’ in the singular.
These kinds of people will be able to navigate change and diversity, learn
as they go and communicate effectively in a wide range of settings. They
will be flexible thinkers, capable of seeing things from multiple
perspectives. They will have an expanded range of ways of making meaning
– a broad communicative repertoire, so they can make and participate in
meanings in a wide variety of social and cultural settings. They will be
capable, in other words, of negotiating ‘literacies’ in the plural.

Literacies as tools for meaning

An ability to work across literacies in the plural opens paths to social

participation, ideally enabling learners from different cultural, social, gender
and socio-economic backgrounds to make meaning and succeed. Underlying
this book are three key agendas for the individual and public good:

• personal enablement, or the ability to lead a life with full capacities for
self-expression and access to available cultural resources
• civic-economic participation, including communicative capacities for
work, informed engagement in political processes and community
participation
• social equity, including capacities to access education, opening access to
social and material resources.

What kinds of literacies learning will enable students to be effective, self-

reliant and actively participating community members, citizens and
workers? And how will literacies contribute to the project of equity, giving
learners from historically marginalised groups opportunities that have not
always been, or are not reliably, available to those groups? And how will we
know when a learner’s potential has been realised and that their learning has
contributed to transforming them into creative and socially effective makers
of meaning?
On a personal note, few of our parents or grandparents, or for that matter
anybody in our families’ pasts, finished high school. We finished school,
went on to university and became academics. We consider education to have
been more than a privilege. It has been a remarkable gift; one which, but for
accidents of circumstance, we might not otherwise have expected. Many of
our peers did not enjoy such a privilege. The story of social mobility in the
modern world is not uncommon; in our case this has been available for
immigrants and less-educated people with aspirations for their children. For
the world’s billions, however, mobility is the exception rather than the rule.
The social position of one generation by-and-large predestines the social
position of the next. And when mobility opportunities do arise, the reason
for the opening most often is education.
We live in a grossly unequal world, and even the most strident defenders
of the status quo argue that the system gives everyone one the best chance.
This chance is education. The chance is ‘equality of opportunity’. The
reality, of course, is that not all schools are as well resourced as others. And
some students from some kinds of backgrounds find the culture of
conventional schooling more congenial than others. As a general rule, those
who find schooling congenial and who go to schools well enough resourced
to be thought ‘good’ succeed; those who do not, fail. This is how, despite its
promise, education also reproduces inequality.
We want to formulate a proposition about this situation, and a
programmatic challenge, as follows:

All schools can be congenial to learners. All schools, even less well
resourced schools, can provide powerfully engaging and effective
learning experiences for all learners. Because they can, they must.

More boldly and more contentiously, we believe that, for the first time, the
promise of education can be made real for all. Our reason for believing so is
the potentials offered by the conjunction of new technologies of meaning-
making with an epochal shift in what we call the ‘balance of agency’, in
which old cultures of command and compliance are being displaced by
cultures of contribution and creative collaboration. The raw material for our
general argument is going to be literacy learning, one of the most significant
things that schools provide. If we, as educators, allow learners more agency,
and we use whatever technological resources are available to support new
relationships between learners and their learning environments, we may be
able to achieve something that has not so far been achieved in the modern
history of mass-institutionalised education – greater equity of outcomes. In
this book, we want to examine the ways in which such a utopian objective
may be achieved through literacies pedagogy.
In making our case, we never move very far from our personal stories and
what motivates us as educators. We have spent our adult lives devoted to
realising what we consider to be one of the key promises of democracy.
Despite changes in pedagogical fashion, content emphasis and classroom
organisation, teacher preparation and professional learning, the inequalities
of learner outcome between different social groups are at best staying the
same or at worst widening. We need to change this situation and, where we
are slipping back, turn things around. Literacies, understood broadly as tools
for meaning, are a key to success at all curriculum domains in school and for
self-realisation in life beyond school.

New literacies, new schools, new teachers

Today’s learners

Schools everywhere in the world are today facing larger challenges than they
ever did in the past, given the diversity of classrooms, the pace of
technological and social change and a crisis of public and private resourcing
for education. The challenge to sustain and expand the historical practices of
literacy pedagogy is but one piece in a larger context of educational change.
Let’s start with our students. In our schools, we see a new generation of
learners. We’ll call them Generation ‘P’, for ‘participatory’. These learners
have different kinds of sensibilities from the students of our recent past.
They have at hand ubiquitous smart devices, connected to the new social
media and allowing them to communicate with people at a distance from
them at any time of day and anywhere.
An earlier generation of learners may have been more used to being
passive watchers of stories at the cinema or on television; this was intrinsic
to the producer-to-consumer dynamic in the ‘mass media’. Generation P,
however, have become used to being characters in the stories of video
games, where they play a part in how the story ends. An earlier generation
used to listen to the ‘top 40’ songs from play lists selected by a radio station.
Generation P make their own playlists for their mobile music players, and if
you ask the students in any class what is on their playlists, they are all going
to tell you something different depending on their preferences.
An earlier generation expanded their habits of literacy by reading in their
spare time, and more so than they did by writing. Generation P do as much
by writing as reading in their spare time – and reading and writing are fused
as integrated practices in social network sites, blogging and text messaging.
An earlier generation passively watched TV programming that others
considered good for them, tuning in to a handful of available channels.
Generation P ‘channel surf’ hundreds of channels, or the millions of videos
that are on the web, or make their own videos – on their cameras or on their
phones – and upload them to the web.
An earlier generation received much of their learning within the formal
context of schooling. Generation P learn more in semi-formal and informal
settings and from a variety of sources – in the self-learning routines of
electronic devices and software applications, for instance, and in social
interactions in expert communities, such as networked gaming and interest
communities on the web.
The world of communication and meaning-making has changed. This
generation are showing signs of being frustrated by an old-fashioned literacy
curriculum that expects them to be passive recipients of knowledge that is
deemed good for them. The children of Generation P do not necessarily take
well to being given rules that they have to apply. Nor are impassive,
compliant dispositions what are required in today’s workplaces and other
community settings. The most productive workers and most effective
community members today are not those who just take orders from the boss
or uncritically follow instructions issued by leaders. They are the ones who
actively participate, who solve problems, who innovate, who take calculated
risks and who are creative. In sum, they ideally give the best of their
innovative and creative selves to the groups and organisations to which they
belong.
New kinds of school environment and new kinds of literacy learning
designs are already emerging that aspire to cater for the next generation of
learner. The curricula of such new schools encourage learners to be actively
and purposefully engaged in their learning by setting them real intellectual
and practical challenges. Teachers and learners are required to make
meaningful choices about what and how they learn in order to meet new,
higher standards of performance and student wellbeing.
Here are just a few examples of the kinds of work students do in the new
school contexts: researching information using multiple sources and
reporting upon their findings in an extended web project report; tackling
real-world problems, which they have to try to solve; documenting
hypotheses; performing trial interventions; reporting on results; analysing
issues from different perspectives; working in groups to create a
collaborative knowledge output; and working in internet and other
multimodal new media spaces that bring together writing, image, sound and
video. These more engaging and more varied learning spaces are more
relevant to the kind of world that Generation P already inhabit in their
everyday lives.
The new learners take greater responsibility for their learning, in part
because they are given greater autonomy and scope for self-control. They are
knowledge-producers, drawing together a range of available knowledge
resources, instead of being knowledge-consumers fed from just one source –
the old reader or textbook – like students in the classrooms of the recent
past. They work effectively in pairs or groups on collaborative knowledge
projects, authoring knowledge to be jointly constructed or shared with peers.
They continue to learn beyond the classroom, using the social media to
continue their reading, writing and learning anywhere and at any time. (This
phenomenon is called ‘ubiquitous learning’.)3 They critically self-assess and
reflect upon their learning. They give feedback to their peers’ writing in
‘social networking’ interactions. They are comfortable players in
environments where intelligence is collective and writing is collaborative.
They no longer draw on the sum of things that can be retained in just one
individual’s head; they have the capacity to source knowledge online or
from other students or from experts, parents and community members.

Tomorrow’s teachers

These are big changes, indeed. However, none of these can be achieved
without a transformation of the teaching profession. If we are to have ‘new
learners’ we need nothing less than ‘new teachers’. The new teachers are
designers of learning environments for engaged students, rather than people
who regurgitate the content of the textbook. They are professionals who are
able create the conditions in which learners take more responsibility for
their own learning. They remain authoritative sources of knowledge without
being authoritarian. They are comfortable with internet learning design and
delivery platforms – learning spaces that are not just lesson plans, nor
textbooks, nor student workbooks but are all these things, with a look and
feel more like social networking or blogging sites.
This evolution of teaching practices involves a big shift in professional
identity, as teaching increasingly moves from being the talking and testing
profession to becoming a hybrid documenting, data-driven profession. The
online environment expands the reach of learning across time and space,
beyond the walls that confine students to a classroom and a bell that
constrains chunks of learning within the set number of minutes for a
‘lesson’.
Instead of closing the door of the classroom and doing their own thing, the
new teachers are collaborative professionals, sharing their learning designs
with other teachers online, reusing and adapting others’ learning designs,
jointly writing learning designs in teams, peer-reviewing others’ learning
designs, team teaching in classes that can sometimes be smaller than normal
and at other times bigger than normal – in other words, immersed in a
professional culture of mutual support and sharing.
The new teacher manages multifaceted learning environments in which
not every student has to be on the same page at the same time. In fact,
different students may be working on different things depending on their
learning levels, needs and interests. And their work will be seamlessly
integrated across time as well as space, as learning interactions continue out-
of-hours and between home and school. Instead of waiting until the test at
the end, the new teacher continuously assesses students, tracking progress
and differentiating their instruction all the time in order to make sure their
teaching is right for each learner’s needs. The new teachers take a greater
degree of control of their professional lives.

Table 0.2: New learning

 How can these enormous changes be negotiated, extended and supported?
One answer is from the bottom up – the solid and sustainable change that
‘users’, ‘consumers’ and ‘producers’ make when they are driving change
rather than reacting to externally imposed change. With the expanding habits
of collaboration and the increasing use of online tools, teachers grow
accustomed to creating more engaging learning tasks and learning
environments, more suitable for Generation P. In turn, these organic
practices create practical professional retraining opportunities for teachers,
where they learn and deploy new learning design skills and ways of engaging
learning and use evidence of observable learner performance to track and
modify the impact of their choices on learner outcomes.
Another direction of reform comes from the top down, in the form of a
reframing of learning objectives of the whole education system, subject by
subject. This requires new educational standards and objectives for
education. Our times are changing to such a degree that nothing less than a
revolution is needed in educational objectives and systems. However,
resource constraints and political ambiguity often make top-down change
difficult to achieve.

Fig. 0.3: Sources of change in education

Meaningful and lasting change requires the support of all sectors of the
community. Teachers need to become a new kind of professional, interacting
with community stakeholders to explain the changes they are making to the
design of learning environments and to engage others in producing
outcomes. Students need to learn how to learn in new ways. Parents need to
participate in and support new kinds of learning, media and learning
environments; these will be very different from the schooling of their
childhood memories.
The transition from learning ‘literacy’ in the traditional sense to learning
‘literacies’ is required by the communication demands of the twenty-first
century. This is but one area of change in a larger frame of educational and
social reference; just one aspect of the ongoing transformation of our
learning processes and educational systems.

How this book is organised

This book is an introduction to literacy teaching and learning. It is a
distillation of the main ideas at the core of a school subject area called
‘literacy’ in many parts of the world and ‘language arts’ in others.
Sometimes the area is named after the national language – ‘English’, for
instance. The body of knowledge in this subject area has historically
concerned itself with learning to read and write. We will argue that the
agenda of ‘literacies’ in the plural should still be reading and writing and
more.
In this book, we attempt to give a comprehensive account of major
approaches to literacy pedagogy. On our journey, we weave between a big-
picture reconceptualisation of the field and grounded stories of the
experiences of learners and teachers, in the past and recently. At the same
time, taking a forward-looking perspective, the book attempts to present, in
a concise way, the Multiliteracies theory of meaning. It also offers an
epistemological framework, mapping the range of pedagogical moves that
teachers can make as they work with learners to develop their capacities to
mean and to communicate.
This book is designed to reach a number of different audiences. These will
include university students beginning to study teaching, and teachers
renewing their knowledge with an additional qualification or just wanting to
‘read up’ on recent developments in their profession. It is an overview and
introduction to the field. Researchers and trainers of teachers may also find
it interesting, particularly as it explores new areas of understanding or
reconceptualises the field.
This is not an easy book. Not that it is deliberately hard; it is just that the
stuff we are talking about is hard. We take exception to the introductory
education textbooks that ‘dumb down’ our field. Sometimes, when reading
education textbooks, you may be excused for getting the feeling that habits
of talking down to children have translated into a discourse that talks down
to teachers. Many such books are, to put in bluntly, pitched at a
patronisingly low level. Talking about education as a discipline is not like
talking with students in a classroom, or with parents about their children’s
learning. Education is a specialised discourse. An overview book in our
discipline should be every bit as demanding as an introductory university-
level text in physics or economics, no less though no more. We want to up
the intellectual ante in terms of what is expected in our field.
This, then, is a challenging book. It is challenging because it has to be.
The issues are just too hard and too important to dilute. In the case of a book
on literacies, our issues are as demanding as applied linguistics, multimodal
discourse analysis, cognitive science, the science of learning, the
anthropology of human diversity and the sociology of inequality.
To help meet these ambitious goals, Literacies is also supplemented by a
website, literacies.com. Here we present extracts from key texts by thinkers
and researchers in our disciplines, keyword definitions and suggestions for
learning tasks.

Guiding narrative

This is an outline of the broad dimensions of an area of learning historically

called ‘literacy’, but which we have chosen to call ‘literacies’ because we
want to cover all that has normally been covered by ‘literacy’ and more.
Part A of the book consists of two chapters exploring the ‘why’ of literacy
learning.

• Chapter 1 discusses the arrival of literacy on the human scene some

thousands of years ago, and its chequered consequences. It takes a
quick tour of our meaning systems on a scale of reference as wide as
our existence as a species: our human natures before the rise of
writing, the impacts of writing and, most recently, human possibilities
in the rise of the new media.
• Chapter 2 looks at the purposes of literacy learning since the rise of
mass, compulsory, institutionalised schooling. We examine the
changing purposes of literacy learning – changes so significant, in fact,
that they warrant a shift in focus from literacy in the singular to
literacies in the plural. In this chapter we focus on the communicative
purposes of literacies in the rapidly changing worlds of work,
citizenship and public life. We then look at their changing ways of
 making meaning in the new, digital media.

Part B is a series of chapters that describe and analyse the approaches or

reasoning that underlie the four major paradigms for literacy teaching and
learning that have emerged since the beginning of modern schooling. All
four pedagogical approaches remain alive and well today. In fact, in Part D
of this book, we want to suggest ways in which we may continue
strategically to deploy revised aspects of all of them: certain at least
partially valid epistemological propositions upon which each approach is
grounded.

• Chapter 3 explores the founding paradigm of literacy in the modern

history of schooling, a ‘didactic’ approach in which students learn the
formal rules of official or standard versions of the national language,
read texts to ‘comprehend’ what the author ‘really’ says, and learn to
appreciate a high-cultural literary canon.
• Chapter 4 examines an ‘authentic’ approach to literacy that emerges as a
serious alternative to didactic literacy in the twentieth century. It
focuses on the learners’ own meanings, the texts that are relevant to
them in their everyday lives, and supports a process of natural
language growth that begins when a child learns to speak.
• Chapter 5 investigates a ‘functional’ approach to literacy, which has
students deconstruct and reconstruct textual genres of educational
success and social power.
• Chapter 6 discusses ‘critical’ literacy pedagogies that explore
differences in language and social power, address real-world
challenges, help students develop their voice for active citizenship and
support them in taking control of their own lives.

Part C analyses the ‘what’ of literacies in the plural as a more expansive,

multimodal version of something that, in an earlier era, was called
‘grammar’.

• Chapter 7 introduces some key concepts that help us understand the

basic features of meaning-making. Representation is meaning-making
to ourselves, or sense-making. Communication is representation that
 has been communicated to another, a message that they have
interpreted. Representation and communication are design processes,
in which we make choices among available resources for meaning,
never simply to reproduce them but to make a new meaning. The
chapter also explains multimodality, and the ways in which we can
learn by switching from one mode to another.
• Chapter 8 begins a journey through the first of several modes of
meaning explored in the remaining chapters of this section: the written
mode. It examines the nature of reading and the relationships between
the sounds of speech (phonemes) and the images of writing
(graphemes). It also outlines several major grammars of language –
traditional grammar, transformational- generative grammar and
systemic-functional grammar – as well as suggesting a Multiliteracies
grammar of writing whose most basic questions can also be applied to
other modes.
• Chapter 9 explores the ways in which meanings are represented in
images, and the ways in which perception (seeing) is connected with
visualisation (image-making) and imagination.
• Chapter 10 explores the dimensions of spatial, tactile and gestural
meaning, from the sensuous materiality of meanings embedded in
lived contexts to the potentials of the tactile mode to express the full
symbolic range of language through Braille and the gestural mode
through sign language.
• Chapter 11 explores audio and oral meanings, contrasting the important
differences between speaking and writing that are often neglected by
literacy pedagogy.

Finally, Part D examines the ‘how’ of learning literacies, or pedagogy.

• Chapter 12 draws on the ideas introduced in Parts B and C to explore the

role of literacies, not just as a defined subject area but as a basis for
thinking and learning in all subject areas.
• Chapter 13 returns to the range of pedagogical approaches described in
Part B, suggesting ways in which each of these can be developed and
extended to create varied and powerful literacies learning
 environments.
• Chapter 14 speaks practically to the ways in which literacies pedagogies
can address the varied learning needs of students in diverse school
populations.
• Chapter 15 explores the translation of literacies pedagogies into
‘standards’ mandated by systems, and assessments that record
individual student progress and the progress of groups of students.

Supplementary web materials

The guiding narrative in this book is supplemented by a website at

literacies.com. Frequent links are made to this website in this book. This site
includes supplementary readings, a glossary of terms used in this book, and
lists of additional readings.

Notes
1 New London Group. 1996. ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing
Social Futures.’ Harvard Educational Review 66:60–92. Cope, Bill and
Mary Kalantzis. 2000b. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the
Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge. Cope, Bill and Mary
Kalantzis. 2009a. ‘“Multiliteracies”: New Literacies, New Learning’.
Pedagogies: An International Journal 4:164–95.
2 Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope. 2008. New Learning: Elements of a
Science of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3 Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. 2009b. Ubiquitous Learning, Champaign
IL: University of Illinois Press.