“Multiliteracies” turns literacy plural. “Literacy,” by historical contrast, has been stubbornly singular, teaching correct usage in standard forms of national languages and the aspirational greatness of their literary canons. The word “multiliteracies” was coined as a deliberate counterpoint.
The multiliteracies proposition is that literacy teaching in its earlier modern forms is no longer enough to prepare learning for effective meaning-making in an era of civic pluralism and digital media, and for these reasons that the agenda of literacy teaching and learning needs to become broader. “Multi” thus adds two things:
- Meaning, in writing as well as speech, varies enormously according to situation. The measure of “correct” needs to be replaced in a time that recognizes diversity by “apt to context.” And there are many genres of aspirational, even inspirational text. Old notions of the literary canon (Cope and Kalantzis 1997) have systematically ignored or neglected certain kinds of writing that circulate and are powerful today.
- Meaning occurs in many forms—and these forms are much of the time inextricably interconnected. This has always been a matter of human nature, but digital media have expanded our access to multimodal meaning. On the printed page of a science textbook, for instance, or in the activity stream of a social media feed, or a captioned video drama, written text is closely connected with image, embodied gesture, speech, and sound. Digital media have accelerated this multimodality because all of text, still or moving image, and sound can be manufactured for exchange in the common coin of binary notation. A separated literacy is no longer viable. As a consequence of this radically integrated and readily accessible multimodality, written text has in some respects become less significant (for instance, our increasing reliance for meaning on image and iconography) and in other respects more significant (such as for tagging or searching, driven by the primary engine of artificial intelligence).
History of the Term
The term “multiliteracies” was coined in 1994 by the New London Group, a group of scholars who came together to consider the current state and possible future of literacy pedagogy. The group consisted of Courtney Cazden, Bill Cope, Norman Fairclough, Jim Gee, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther Kress, Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels, and Martin Nakata. The group’s initial deliberations produced an article-long manifesto (New London Group 1996) followed by a book to which all the members of the group contributed (Cope and Kalantzis 2000). Key publications of the members group before and since that date include Cazden 2018; Cope and Kalantzis 2009; Fairclough 1989 2014; Gee 1990 2014; Kalantzis et al. 2012 2016; Kress 2009; Luke 2018; Luke 2005; Michaels and Sohmer 2001; and Nakata 2007. For further detail, Kalantzis and Cope have written an updated overview article (Cope and Kalantzis 2023a) and a collective biography and literature review of the idea of multiliteracies (Kalantzis and Cope 2023).
Multimodality Serves Plural Literacies
With changed communications media, we argued that the time had come to widen the frame of reference of literacy to encompass “multimodality,” or the more frequently juxtaposition of written text with other forms of meaning, particularly image. And rather than consider literacy to be a singular standard, social diversity required us to consider “literacies” in the plural.
Recognizing literacies are plural and context dependent is essential to inclusion.
In the digital world we engage in narrative as much as ever before, and textual practice meets other forms of meaning in a wide range of narrative practices. We make small or larger stories of our lives in the captioned images of social media. We create videos that link speech, body and object, and when they have been more systematically designed it is often because they were orchestrated in text by scripting or storyboarding. Then they might be supplemented with closed captioning for the convenience of viewers.
That aligns with our advocacy on bricolage and pastiche.
An Encyclopedia of Disability and Difference – Stimpunks Foundation
Lyrics
Lyric texts offer an opportunity to explore the transpositions between text and sound in poetry and musical lyrics.
We include lyrics and music all over our site. “When the movement is strong, the music is strong.”
Emotion
The time has now come to bring emotions and bodies back into our educational objectives. In well-balanced learning, we need to keep moving between all of these cognitive, affective and embodied things.
Non-Hierarchical
Instead of a hierarchy, multiliteracies pedagogy proposes a repertoire of knowledge processes, where learners and teachers orchestrate strategic moves between one kind of knowledge activity and another, though in no necessary order.
The above aligns with our advocacy of workflow thinking.
- Workflow Thinking – Stimpunks Foundation
- Everyone Needs a Properly Equipped Toolbelt to Get Through Life – Stimpunks Foundation
Epistemic Capital
For the outcomes of today’s schooling, the new “basics,” we have proposed the term “epistemic capital”—not cognitive capital or mental capacity in isolation, but the capacity to meld the ideal of conscious meaning with the material of its media.
For the outcomes of contemporary schooling, we have proposed the term “epistemic capital”—not cognitive capital or mental capacity in isolation, but the capacity to meld conscious meaning with the material of its media. Epistemic capital acquired though education is a powerful determinant of social outcomes. More than ever in the era of digitization, automation, and artificial intelligence, education is the principal pathway to attaining epistemic capital.
This may at times take learners no further than learning to play the game, using education to get ahead. And so be it. Education does its job when it affords expanded access for those who had been previously denied. But hopefully more—epistemic capital opens a broader vista, where the grand challenges of our times come into view, including among others the baleful effects of human presence in the biosphere, the lacerations of inequality, and the quest for personal meaning in community. Multiliteracies sets out to make a contribution to these wider and deeper agendas of education justice—at both the personal and social levels (Cope and Kalantzis 2023a).
We like “epistemic capital” in this age of mass epistemic injustice.
- Reading the World: Conspiratorialism, Schismogenesis, and Epistemic Injustice – Stimpunks Foundation
- Epistemic Injustice – Stimpunks Foundation
