describe a multiliterate teacher essay

College of Education

• Our Mission & Vision
• Leading with Passion
• Culture & Community
• Commitment to Equity and Justice
• Great Minds Think Illinois
• The Research One Advantage
• News, Events & Announcements
• Impact Report
• Alumni and Advancement
• College of Education Bylaws
• Undergraduate Programs
• Graduate Programs
• Online Programs
• Principal & Superintendent Endorsements and Degrees
• International Programs
• Course Finder
• Program Finder
• Faculty Research Sites
• Public Engagement
• Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series
• Bureau of Educational Research
• Faculty Directory
• Curriculum & Instruction
• Education Policy, Organization & Leadership
• Educational Psychology
• Special Education
• Find Emeritus
• Find Graduate Students
• New Faculty 2023-24
• Undergraduate Students
• Graduate Students
• Online Students
• School and Community Experiences
• 2024 Convocation

Understanding and Using Multiliteracies for Learners in a Digital World

by Tom Hanlon / May 11, 2021

In two recently-released books, two College of Education professors help educators navigate a world of multiliteracies to help learners use various forms of meaning-making in their lives.

In 2020, Professors Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis came out with a two-volume set, published by Cambridge University Press, that explores a grammar of multimodal meaning. The books received rave reviews [i] from renowned experts in the field of multimodal and digital literacies. The two volumes are Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning and Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning . The two professors, recognized globally for their expertise in this field, talk about their two books here.

A reviewer wrote that you two consider the traditional notion of literacy, with its focus on reading and writing, to have outlived its usefulness, and that educators must focus instead on educating for multiliteracies. Can you explain multiliteracies, and how educators can best operate in a world where multiliteracies are so important?

Kalantzis: We are really interested in meaning-making—its forms (how we mean) and the functions that go with them (what we mean). Humans have always been synesthetic in the way that they make meaning, moving between sounds, images, their bodies, space, speech, and written text. The invention of writing, which historically speaking is a recent phenomenon, and later the printing press, have in modern times come to dominate education as a privileged conduit of knowledge. The case we make is that the digital age opens up multiple forms of meaning-making and manufactures them with the same tools—even a small child can now send a digital audio message, visual, or text message on the same device! This is what is revolutionary about the digital age in which we now live. Our aim is to prompt educators to consider the affordances of the digital for meaning-making and to provide a language with which it can be described and analyzed.

Cope: Traditional literacy separated written text from other forms of meaning; however, in digital media today, text is rarely separated from other forms. For instance, web pages and their navigation paths are essentially visual in their overall design. The literacy of even traditional academic subjects is changing. History comes to us these days in video, timeline infographics, immersive reproductions of events, and participant interviews. Scientific articles include diagrams, images, tables, datasets, and visualizations that are sometimes manipulable by the viewer, and in some disciplines video as well. Accessible digital media have changed the way we “read” and “write.” Some time back, we coined the term “multiliteracies” to capture this reality—as well as the growing diversity of usage in the context of a deeply multicultural world.

True to its title, in Making Sense , you provide ways for readers to “make sense” of meaning-making wherever it occurs and for whomever it is relevant. Can you speak to this idea of meaning-making and its relevancy, particularly from the vantage point of educators?

Kalantzis: Alphabet/symbolic literacy has become the gold standard for powerful meaning-making; however, for better and for worse, the most powerful means that are now emerging take a principally visual form—video, the instantly-shared image, the dominance of images in social media feeds, and so on. Educators need to enable learners to understand the power of each mode (and in its mixed or multimodal forms), its uses, and how it circulates. No longer is the visual simply an adjunct to “writing” in any discipline. For instance, in engineering, medicine, and the arts, the visual has become central and equally powerful in communicating content in the form of diagrams, infographics, plans, and data visualizations. The use of imagery in education cannot be simply as pastiche or decoration; learners need to understand how to manufacture multimodal making that is more powerfully evidence-driven and explanatory. It also can provide an additional channel for the purposeful voice of the learner-creator.

Cope: We often think of literacy as communication, and the focus of learning as cognition. Our notion of “sense” broadens both these ideas. More than communication, sense-making is representation (how we make sense to ourselves, meaning-making that we may never communicate). Then, if another person catches my meaning (communication), there is interpretation. This is how we make sense of something that has been communicated. In a world of deep human diversity, communication is never a matter of transmission. The person “catching” my meaning always does so on the basis of their own life experience and interests. Sometimes the difference is beneficial (for instance, learning), other times it reproduces prejudice and misunderstanding. But there is always a difference. Interpretation is about how we live harmoniously and productively with our differences.

On the question of cognition, this is never something just “in our heads.” We figure things out with media—writing notes, sketching diagrams, speaking to ourselves, taking photographs and a myriad of other pre-communicative practices. We use these artifact-making practices to make sense for ourselves. Pens, computers, and recording devices become what we call “cognitive prostheses,” or tools of our mind. So learning is not just about cognition; it is also about how to use these meaning-making tools as extensions of our selves.

In your book, you describe “grammar” as shorthand for “identifying and naming patterns in meaning,” and note that your grammar is a “grammar of multimodality.” What does this mean for educators? How should this inform their communication with students?

Cope: We like this old-fashioned word, “grammar,” because it captures the idea of thinking explicitly about our meanings, their forms (the “how” of meaning-making), and their functions (“what” we mean) . But we want to extend this as a framework to describe all forms of meaning and their multimodal overlay: text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech. Think about a visit to the museum, or watching sport on TV—all of these forms of meaning come together.

Kalantzis: It is important that educators have the tools to help learners understand and deploy various forms of meaning-making in meaningful and impactful ways. Also, this facilitates a shift in the balance of agency, allowing learners to be substantive co-creators of content in their subject areas, to add their voice and orientation to the meanings with which they engage.

You also write that “transpositional grammar” can be used to bring together major theoretical approaches to understanding meaning into one comprehensive framework to systematically parse multimodal texts. How does this work, and why is this important, particularly to educators?

Cope: The main question we ask in these books is, “How do we develop a shared terminology to describe different forms of meaning?” For instance, let’s take something as simple as a proper noun and a common noun in text. How do we do this in images? “Mary Kalantzis” is a proper noun; “person” is a "common noun.” In image, a selfie is a like a proper noun, and a person is the familiar generic icon that we now see everywhere. To develop a common language, we call “Mary Kalantzis” and her photo an “instance,” and “person" and the icon a “concept.” To go back to our subject examples, in history and science we generalize by moving between instances and concepts, and when a learner writes a multimodal science text, they do this in both image and text.

Kalantzis: It’s not an either/or situation for us; we are not abandoning traditional grammar with its emphasis on labeling parts of speech and their function. We are just changing the labels in order to expand their applicability to multimodal texts. We want to expand the repertoire that educators have for the complex multimodal meaning that are relevant across all subject matter, both in its delivery and reception.

A reviewer noted that you present much more than merely an exposition on a grammar of multimodality in your book. He wrote: “It is also a rich historical account of meaning and grammar, tracing the lives and ideas of personalities across cultures, some well-known, many less so, and in so doing, often vindicating and validating their contributions to human knowledge.” Can you give an example or two of whose lives and ideas you traced, and what their contributions were?

Kalantzis: It is important that we do not just live in the immediate present as if it was always thus. Educators need to understand why some forms of meaning-making are privileged, how that came to be, and what other possibilities are emerging and even necessary.

Cope: We are both historians, so we like to uncover the stories behind the media and the thinkers. Who knew that the first emojis were created at the University of Illinois? Who could have imagined that Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest language philosopher of the twentieth century, gave up philosophy for a time to become an architect? Who remembers today that the first grammar was by the Indian thinker Panini more than two thousand years ago, whose work on language also anticipated the abstract logics of computer programming? How can Indigenous peoples give us a sense of the scope of human meaning that goes well beyond our own comparatively simplistic senses of time and space?

This same reviewer called your work “a political and scholarly tour de force—an advocacy for the forgotten and marginalized.” Talk about how it advocates for the forgotten and marginalized.

Kalantzis: All meaning-making is political in some way, as it represents a worldview or philosophy of living. We believe it’s time to reflect on all that seems solid, our habits and what we privilege, and our implicit biases—not in order to discard immediately but to understand the effects of what we value and what might need to change. Certainly education, of all the sites of social activity, seems at times to change slowly and only begrudgingly. You can enter many classrooms today and it is like walking into the past: the textbooks, the exams, the arrangement of the room, the student-teacher relationships. Much of the time, if there has been change, it has been minimalist. The infrastructure that supports it is expensive and doggedly pervasive. The digital portends a break with tradition, but it has dangers as well as advantages that educators need to be aware of as they harness its new tools.

Cope: We have tried to provide rich examples from a wide range of cultures—the great Arab thinkers at the end of the first millennium; that brilliant but still largely unknown philosopher of “empathy," Edith Stein; W.E.B. DuBois’ stunning visualizations, neglected until recently; and Gladys B. West, an African-American whose work on GPS has changed the way we experience space.

A different reviewer wrote that your book would help educators “whose main educational challenges are education inequality, learner diversity, and the potentials of new technologies.” Can you speak to how the book will help educators facing these challenges?

Kalantzis: Stubborn inequalities are underpinned by a system of meaning-making and habits associated with them. Both need reflection because today we must recognize diversity that has until now been unacknowledged. Despite  globalization, the world is fostering more diversity, not less, and the new technology allows more agency and differentiation—for good and bad social outcomes. It is imperative to understand this infrastructure and its effects, to help design it and deploy it in the interest of the common good. We can’t just tread water, sticking with what we know and value and think that the trajectory of meaning-making in the world is marginal and won’t impact each of our lives. Our work, as educators, has always this challenge at its core. Diversity and new technology are the twin pillars of what we need to grapple with in education in order to prepare learners for a complex, contested future.

Cope: These books offer a conceptual basis for our work in the area of literacy. The original “multiliteracies” article that we wrote jointly with our colleagues in the New London Group for the  Harvard Educational Review  has become one of the most cited articles in the area of literacy teaching and learning. Our  Literacies  book, like  Making Sense  and  Adding Sense,  was published by Cambridge University Press. Now in its second edition,  Literacies  has since been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek. The two new  Sense  books provide the comprehensively researched, multimodal grammar that we have in our multiliteracies publications been promising for some time.

The cover images for the two volumes tell stories of how meanings come to be transposed. The chair is an oil painting of a photo taken in Greece by Cope and repainted by a Chinese artist whose regular job is to make copies of famous paintings. These plastic chairs are everywhere in Greece, so much so that they have become a modern symbol of the country. They are sold by Roma (gypsies) from the backs of trucks—hence the title “Gypsy China Chairs.” The image frame is made of some old plaster moldings found in a junk store in Champaign. This is a multimodal, transcultural story that speaks to the work Cope and Kalantzis have done in their research on Roma education in Greece. T he second cover image is from an indigenous community in the far north of Australia, where they have worked on several literacy projects, Yirrkala. It is painted by Yolŋu artist Rerrkirrwaŋa Munuŋgurr. The center of the image is a ceremonial ground, a place where people meet to make sense of life and death. The crosshatching encloses what would be, without it, a barely comprehensible black space. Among the many references of the image: the shimmering surfaces of the freshwater lagoons that surround the ceremonial site, providing food and life. And less abstractly, the spears with which fish are caught, and in the crosshatching, the patterns of the fish nets. Then more abstractly, multimodal meanings where a person is a sacred place, is a totem, and where a place is a song is a ceremonial dance and now also a bark painting.

[i] [i] Bateman, John A., "Book Review: Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning Making, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis,” Journal of Pragmatics 172:164-66, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.10.008.

Lim, Fei Victor, "Review of Cope and Kalantzis, Making Sense and Adding Sense ,” Multimodality & Society 1(1):119-23, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2634979521992025.

Zollo, Sole Alba, "Review of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning ,” Language and Dialogue 10(3):443–46, 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00078.zol.

• Language Education

A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies and Its Role in English Language Education

• November 2020
• In book: Contemporary Foundations for Teaching English as an Additional Language: Pedagogical Approaches and Classroom Applications (pp.151-159)
• Publisher: Routledge

• Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations

• Jennifer Burton

• S. M. Javed Anwar

• Ofelia García
• Kate Seltzer
• Polina Vinogradova

• J ADOLESC ADULT LIT

• Kathryn Chavez
• Patricia L. Anders

• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Multiple Literacies: Definition, Types, and Classroom Strategies

Dann Tardif / Getty Images

• Technology in the Classroom
• An Introduction to Teaching
• Tips & Strategies
• Policies & Discipline
• Community Involvement
• School Administration
• Teaching Adult Learners
• Issues In Education
• Teaching Resources
• Becoming A Teacher
• Assessments & Tests
• Elementary Education
• Secondary Education
• Special Education
• Homeschooling

Traditionally, literacy has referred to the ability to read and write. A literate person can communicate effectively through writing and assimilate information from reading. However, in today’s technology-driven world, the word literacy has expanded to encompass an ability to communicate effectively and absorb information through a variety of mediums.

The term multiple literacies (also called new literacies or multi-literacies) recognizes that there are many ways to relay and receive information, and that students need to be proficient in each one.

Types of Literacy

The four primary areas of aptitude are visual, textual, digital, and technological literacy. Each literacy type is described below.

Visual Literacy

Visual literacy refers to an individual’s ability to understand and evaluate information presented through images such as pictures, photographs, symbols, and videos. Visual literacy means going beyond simply looking at the image; it involves assessing the message the image is trying to convey or the feelings it is designed to evoke.

Developing strong visual literacy involves teaching students to observe and analyze images. They should be trained to observe the image as a whole and note what they see. Then, they should think about its purpose. Is it meant to inform? Entertain? Persuade? Finally, students should learn to infer the image’s significance.

Visual literacy also includes a student’s ability to express themselves effectively through digital media. That doesn’t mean that all students will become artists, but one practical application is a student’s ability to put together a visual presentation that accurately and effectively communicates information.

Textual Literacy

Textual literacy is what most people would associate with the traditional definition of literacy. At a basic level, it refers to a person’s ability to assimilate written information, such as literature and documents, and to communicate effectively in writing. However, textual literacy goes beyond merely reading information. Students must be able to analyze, interpret, and evaluate what they’ve read.

Textual literacy skills include the ability to put what is read into context, evaluate it, and challenge it, if necessary. Analyzing and responding to books, blogs, news articles, or websites through reports, debates, or persuasive or opinion essays is one way to build a student's textual literacy.

Digital Literacy

Digital literacy refers to an individual’s ability to locate, evaluate, and interpret information found through digital sources, such as websites, smartphones, and video games. Students must learn to evaluate digital media critically and determine if a source is credible , identify the author’s point of view, and determine the author’s intent.

Help students learn to recognize satire by providing samples from spoof websites such as The Onion or Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus . Older students will also benefit from reading a variety of opinion and news articles in order to determine which ones are least biased.

Technological Literacy

Technological literacy refers to a person’s ability to use a variety of technologies (such as social media, online video sites, and text messages) appropriately, responsibly, and ethically.

A technologically literate student understands not only how to navigate digital devices, but also how to do so safely while protecting their privacy and that of others, obeying copyright laws, and respecting the diversity of culture, beliefs, and opinions they will encounter. To develop their technological literacy skills, assign your students projects that require online research.

Teaching multiple literacies requires teachers to understand technology themselves. Teachers should look for ways to engage with their colleagues in the technology that their students are using, such as social media, blogging, and gaming.

How to Teach Multiple Literacies

Teachers must provide opportunities for students to develop multiple literacies in the classroom. Students should learn to locate, evaluate, and process information and communicate what they have learned to others. Try these tips for integrating multiple literacies in the classroom.

Create Engaging Classroom Activities

Engage in activities to promote visual literacy, such as Five Card Flickr . Provide students with five random photos or images. Ask them to write a word associated with each image, name a song that reminds them of each image, and describe what all of the images have in common. Then, invite the students to compare their answers.

Diversify Text Media

Provide a variety of ways for students to interact with text, such as books in print, audio, and electronic formats. You may wish to allow students to listen to an audiobook while following along in the print version. Try posting infographics where students can read them or allowing time for students to listen to podcasts.

Provide Access to Digital Media

Ensure that students have opportunities to access a variety of digital media for collecting and creating information. Students may wish to read blogs or websites or watch videos on YouTube or streaming services to research topics of interest. Then, they can create a blog, video, or other digital media presentation to relay what they learn.

Between 5th and 8th grade, prepare students for high school and beyond by allowing them to choose a topic to research for the semester or year. Guide students in learning to read web pages, identify the author, determine the credibility of the information, and cite sources. Students should then use digital media (or a combination of digital and print) to create a presentation on their topic.

Use Social Media

If your students are 13 and older, consider setting up a classroom Twitter account or a Facebook group. Then, use it to communicate with your students and to model the safe, responsible, and ethical use of social media.

Resources for Developing Multiple Literacies

Apart from classroom integration, there are many resources for students to develop multiple literacies. Students will naturally use many of these resources, such as gaming, the Internet, and social media outlets.

Many libraries now recognize multiple literacies and offer resources for students, such as free computer and internet access, e-books and audiobooks, tablet access, and digital media workshops.

Students can also use free tools that are available on their smartphones, digital devices, or computers to explore multiple literacies. Some suggestions include:

• iMovie for video creation
• GarageBand for creating podcasts, music, or sound effects
• Google products such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides
• Apple Podcasts on iPhone and Stitcher or Spotify on Android for accessing podcasts
• Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• What Is GIS and How to Use It in Education
• What to Do When the Technology Fails in Class
• STAR Early Literacy Review
• Issues With Integrating Technology in the Classroom
• Comprehensive Review of the STAR Math Online Assessment
• A Comprehensive Review of the Star Reading Program
• 5 Free Assessment Apps for Teachers
• A Review of Reading Eggspress
• Explore the World From Your Home or Classroom With These 7 Virtual Field Trips
• Top 10 Tech Tools for Grades K-5
• Interactive Science Websites for the Classroom
• Basic Classroom Technology Every Teacher Needs
• Interactive Reading and Phonics Websites
• Kindergarten Ed Tech Explorations
• 5 Interactive Math Websites
• An Overview of Renaissance Learning Programs

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Mapping Multiliteracies onto the Pedagogy of K-12 Teachers

This qualitative research maps multiliteracies onto the pedagogy of teachers of kindergarten through grade 12. It examines how teachers ready their students to become multiliterate beings, that is, how teachers approach literacy in a manner that is reflective of the diversity of students in order to prepare them for their futures in a competitive digital world. Twenty teachers from Northwestern Ontario were selected using intensity sampling to participate in audio-taped interviews. The sample included three teachers from each of the elementary grades (kindergarten, primary, junior and intermediate) and eight teachers from the secondary panel (intermediate/senior). Teachers were nominated by school administrators and curriculum leaders based on a provided list of multiliteracies indicators. An interview guide was used to isolate elements of the content of multiliteracies (designing processes) and the form (situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practic...

Related Papers

Language and Literacy

Jyrkiäinen, Anne

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.

Stefania Savva

Currently, dramatic changes take place in terms of rapidly emerging modes of communication, technologies, increased cultural diversity, evolving workplaces cultures, new challenges for equitable education and the varying and changing identities of students everywhere. Bearing this in mind, this paper argues of the need for museums to respond to global trends by investigating the potential of multiliteracies theory and pedagogy to facilitate learning. Drawing from a doctoral research, this paper will address: What sort of pedagogical approach and engagement with multiliteracies would empower museum visiting for learning 21st century skills? Briefly reporting on the role of museums in the 21st century, the core of this paper is to present a conceptual model called “Museum-based Multiliteracies-Dynamic Learning Approach” (MMDLA) where multiliteracies pedagogy plays a central role (New London Group 1996, Cope and Kalantzis 2000). The model presents a pedagogy-driven, research led and empirically based approach. A single case study undertaken in the form of a Museum Learning Project (MLP) with a school group in Cyprus is described to explain implementation practices of the proposed model. Findings indicate that addressing museum-based multiliteracies can be meaningful for learning in museums, and particularly for museum-school relationships, as it recognizes the particular demands of developing learning experiences in museum settings that enable cultural participation (Mathewson-Mitchell 2007, 3). Keywords: Museum Learning, Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Museum Based Pedagogy, Model, Diversity, 21st Century Skills

Currently, evolving ways of communication, interpretation and creation of meaning are challenging the ways people view themselves and the world, altering their learning demands and needs. Closely related to this process of change is the need to re-conceptualize schooling. Working within these realizations, the theories of affinity spaces and multiliteracies pedagogy are brought into the foreground of the discussion to consider: What are the requirements of school for the twenty-first century? What are the potentials of affinity spaces and multiliteracies pedagogy to empower meaningful school-based learning? The core of this chapter reports on the development, implementation and evaluation of a theory based framework named Affinity Multiliteracies Practice (AMP) with the intention to provide an example of a teaching and learning approach to schooling that acknowledges students’ multiple and diverse identities, experiences and capabilities while also equipping them to become the flexible and dynamic learners required in the twenty-first century.

Journal of Nusantara Studies

Tamas Kiss , Ken Mizusawa

Given the dynamic, global and multimodal character of English in the 21st century, it should be reasonable to expect English language (EL) teaching to accommodate the influences of media and technology on modern communication practices. In Singapore, education policy therefore highlights multiliteracies as one of three foci for the EL classroom. Yet, scant attention has been paid in research and practice to the impact of technology-mediated communication on writing pedagogy. This paper presents the findings of an extensive multiple-case study research project which sought to establish how multiliteracies pedagogy was being utilized in Singaporean secondary teachers’ classrooms and the significant internal and external factors that contributed to classroom practice. The research explored six EL teachers’ practices within one unit of work, focusing on writing skills. Data were gathered through video recorded lesson observations, pre- and post-lesson interviews to explore rationales and justifications for planning and implementation, and focus group discussions to establish common practices, values and beliefs towards writing pedagogy. The study found that although teachers were aware of and trained in multiliteracy practices, they dominantly addressed writing as a monomodal form of communication, limited student autonomy and critical development, and neglected culture in their instruction. We argue that writing instruction must be socially situated and multimodal and teacher education must prepare practitioners to empower learners to become critical and effective writers. We also assert that examination-oriented practices make writing in the classroom inauthentic and largely incomprehensible, despite belief that the opposite is true.

Jonathan Ferreira

In recent years, there has been a staggering increase of forcibly displaced people worldwide. Upon arrival in the host country, migrant and refugee-background children (MRBC) may be particularly at risk due to the challenge of adjusting to a new language, school culture, and sociocultural changes. In this context, this research aimed to shed light on the language and content-area learning of MRBC in a community elementary school in Greater Vancouver, BC. By using an inductive thematic analysis, this multiple-case study sought to understand how three Grade 2/3 learners could enhance academic language proficiency and science learning while foregrounding aspects of their identities through various playful practices. Theoretical frameworks included sociocultural perspectives on literacy, a pedagogy of multiliteracies, conceptions of play, and identity. Data encompassed field notes, photos and videos of in-class activities, artifacts, and interviews with students and their teachers. Findings suggest that the three MRBC learned about the importance of water and its cycle through multimodal meaning-making, which entailed engaging in a meaning-making flow, creating hybrid narratives of new knowledge, and learning collaboratively. The three MRBC also foregrounded aspects of their identities in multimodal productions, such as their sense of belonging, lifeworld experiences and agentic imagined identities. This research responded to a gap in the literature about MRBC’s literacy education in content-area subjects in Canadian mainstream classrooms; it also demonstrated how playful practices can give rise to synesthetic learning and open doorways to MRBC’s wealth of lifeworld knowledge and agentic identities in a science classroom.

The Reading Teacher

Handbook of Research on Pedagogies and Cultural Considerations for Young English Language Learners, Publisher: ICI Global

Ruth Harman , Dong-shin Shin

In recent decades, high-stakes school reforms and draconian budget cuts have constrained the autonomy of public school teachers in developing multi literacy approaches with emergent bilingual learners (e.g., English-only laws, high stakes testing). This paper describes the community and multimodal instructional practices of two urban elementary school teachers/ researchers, developed in the context of a professional development initiative. Using critical, sociocultural conceptions of literacy and qualitative methods of investigation, the paper investigates different aspects of the teachers' writing instruction (i.e., community involvement; genre-based instruction; digital literacy; and multimodality); it also explores how the writing processes of focal bilingual students incorporated these practices. Findings show that this approach positioned bilingual learners as agentive text makers. In addition, the second grade students developed a heightened awareness of audience and context. Implications are discussed, including the pressing need for teacher collaboration, robust school-university partnerships, and innovative multimodal approaches to literacy. 2 2 INTRODUCTION

Literacy Learning: The Middle Years

Lisbeth Kitson

Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies

Agustín Reyes-Torres

Twenty-first-century language education involves paying attention to the multimodal pedagogical demands of a global digital world. To this end, effective English language teaching (ELT) requires preparation on the part of instructors in terms of consciously guiding learners’ literacy development and integrating multiple modes of creating meaning that are broader than language alone. This article supports the notion of literacy as a multidimensional concept and proposes a multimodal toolkit as a means for teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) to work with key literary and visual elements. Focusing on the reading of The Snow Lion (Helmore and Jones 2017), we discuss the meaningful interaction between words and images that defines picturebooks and implement the multiliteracies pedagogy approach, which is comprised of four knowledge processes, i.e., experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying. The final objective is to guide young students to produce meaning and think critically in the EFL classroom through the analysis and interpretation of picturebooks.

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

International Journal of Learning

Anne Cloonan

Kathy Hibbert

Shakina Rajendram

Lisa K Taylor , Jim Cummins

Wambui Gichuru

Youngjoo Yi

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Wendy Cumming-Potvin

Heather Lotherington

Canadian Journal of Education

Frances Giampapa

Terry Loerts

Finita Dewi

Chantelle Warner , Beatrice Dupuy

Research in the Teaching of English

Amy Frederick , Anne Crampton , Jodi Baker , Richard Beach , Mark A Sulzer , Amanda Haertling Thein

Journal of Language & Literacy Education

Treavor Bogard , Annamary Consalvo

margaret hagood

Tuba Angay-Crowder

Kara Clayton

Ana Lopez-Sanchez

Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies

Roseli Nascimento

Julia Rodriguez

Learning, Media and Technology

Jon M. Wargo , Kara Clayton

Thinking Skills and Creativity

Cynthia ADLERSTEIN

International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning

Beryl Exley

Aare 2008 Changing Climates Education For Sustainable Futures

Carolyn Fortuna

Cinzia Forasiepi

Jon M. Wargo

Lynn E Shanahan

Natalie Cooper

Stacey J Fisher

Nazila Eisazadeh , Rosamund Stooke

Thi Thu Ha Nguyen , Fei Victor LIM , Csilla Weninger

Adelia Carstens

Linguistics and Education

Meg Gebhard

Pratiwi Retnaningdyah , Agus Khairi

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Original Language Spotlight
• Alternative and Non-formal Education 
• Cognition, Emotion, and Learning
• Curriculum and Pedagogy
• Education and Society
• Education, Change, and Development
• Education, Cultures, and Ethnicities
• Education, Gender, and Sexualities
• Education, Health, and Social Services
• Educational Administration and Leadership
• Educational History
• Educational Politics and Policy
• Educational Purposes and Ideals
• Educational Systems
• Educational Theories and Philosophies
• Globalization, Economics, and Education
• Languages and Literacies
• Professional Learning and Development
• Research and Assessment Methods
• Technology and Education
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Multiliteracies in classrooms.

• Robyn Seglem Robyn Seglem Illinois State University
• , and  Antero Garcia Antero Garcia Stanford University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1803
• Published online: 18 July 2022

Multiliteracies were first conceptualized in 1994 by the New London Group (NLG), a group of global scholars who specialized in different aspects of literacy instruction including classroom discourse, multilingual teaching and learning, new technologies, critical discourse and literacy, linguistics, cultural and social educations, semiotics, and visual literacy. Published in 1996, the NLG focused on equalizing the power dynamics within education by moving away from traditional print-based literacies that privilege the cultural majority who hold the most wealth and power in the world. Their work seeks to elevate those who are traditionally marginalized by embracing literacies that leverage multiple languages, discourses, and texts. Multiliteracies have been widely adopted, expanded upon, and contested in academia, but classroom teachers have been much slower in adopting them. Although systems of accountability and standardization contribute to a slow adoption of multiliteracies practices, teachers have found ways to integrate multiliteracies into instruction. In doing so, students are provided with more linguistic capital and a deeper understanding of how meaning is made across multiple contexts.

• multiliteracies
• critical literacy
• digital technologies

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Education. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 12 September 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [81.177.182.159]
• 81.177.182.159

Character limit 500 /500

• Skip to primary navigation
• Skip to main content

Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments

September 2005 — volume 9, number 2, * on the internet *, the notion of ‘multiliteracies’.

The term ‘multiliteracies’ was coined in ( 1996 ) by the New London Group ( who? ) to address “the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today” for students and users of technology through “creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment.” As they define the term more comprehensively:

The notion of multiliteracies supplements traditional literacy pedagogy by addressing these two related aspects of textual multiplicity. What we might term “mere literacy” remains centered on language only, and usually on a singular national form of language at that, which is conceived as a stable system based on rules such as mastering sound-letter correspondence. This is based on the assumption that we can discern and describe correct usage. Such a view of language will characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy. A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects. In some cultural contexts – in an Aboriginal community or in a multimedia environment, for instance – the visual mode of representation may be much more powerful and closely related to language than “mere literacy” would ever be able to allow. Multiliteracies also creates a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes.

This notion has struck a chord among educators, as a search on the term in Google will amply reveal. The Canadian Multiliteracy Project for example has mounted a study “exploring pedagogies or teaching practices that prepare children for the literacy challenges of our globalized, networked, culturally diverse world.” Recognizing that “we encounter knowledge in multiple forms – in print, in images, in video, in combinations of forms in digital contexts – and are asked to represent our knowledge in an equally complex manner,” the site aims at how “educational stakeholders might collaboratively construct and disseminate knowledge” – http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/multiliteracies/

This is but one of many projects addressing the considerable impact of technology on how we formulate meaning and represent it in interaction with others, and how we as teachers must prepare those we influence to cope successfully with the challenges facing them in adapting to these developments. Multiliteracy is more than just ‘multimedia literacy’ or “nontext writing,” which was the topic of a talk given by Elizabeth Daley recently at the University of Michigan, School of Information: http://intel.si.umich.edu/news/news-detail.cfm?NewsItemID=136 , but encompasses “approaches to learning that place production technology in the hands of the learner … and recognizes the importance of interactivity and nonlinear skills,” so that various forms of technology become an instrumental part of the learning process.

Nowadays, students and particularly their life-long-learner teachers, are not only having to deal constantly with new technologies impacting their lives, but are having to harness these very technologies to help them keep up with developments in order to in turn use these same technologies to build constructive learning environments. Modeling and implementing the heuristics of effective information management are becoming increasingly crucial responsibilities of educators, which means that educators must themselves become familiar with appropriate applications of a wide range of new technologies. A multiliterate teacher not only understands the many ways that technology interacts and intertwines with academic and personal life, but actively learns how to gain control over those aspects of technology impacting interpersonal and professional development. Furthermore, multiliterate individuals are aware of the pitfalls inherent in technology even as they promote empowerment through effective strategies for first discerning and then taking advantage of those aspects of changing technologies most appropriate to their situations. These strategies include managing, processing, and interpreting a constant influx of information, filtering what is useful, and then enhancing the learning environment with the most appropriate applications, and doing so with awareness of a complex set of socio-political impacts ( Selber, 2004 ; Leu et al, 2004 ).

Other notions: from ‘print literacy’ to ‘connectivism’

This ascendancy of the concept of multiliteracies among educators has been accompanied by an examination of what Myron Tuman (in several works, including his book Word Perfect , 1992 ) referred to as ‘print literacy,’ a representation of knowledge through writing and graphics placed on paper or similar surface, meant to be read or viewed in the context of that surface, and which has dominated serious communications media well into an era of radio, television, and cinema (and see Murray, 2000 ). Tuman’s book, ironically, is very much a product of the culture of publishing, where thoughts are developed logically, finalized, and fixed in ink. Many of the documents dealing with multiliteracies both on and off the Web are in that format; for example Unsworth ( 2001 ), the New London Group document ( 1996 ) referred to previously, and Selber’s ( 2004 ) excellent book subsuming the various multiliteracies in a tripartite arrangement of functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies.

However, Tuman envisaged in his book a ‘docuverse’ where texts interlinked, were neither owned nor fixed, were annotatable (as in a wiki, like Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ ), and where print culture was subsumed under a wider range of communications media. Accordingly, there is an emerging body of work distributed over the Internet touching on multiliteracies which incorporate many of these elements. Interestingly, a certain level of multiliteracy is achieved not only in recording and uploading these presentations to the Internet, but also in assuming that there is a multiliterate audience somewhere that has assembled the components on individual computers to enable them to download and play these presentations, and follow the links given that will open a docuverse of resources, some perhaps annotatable. The rapid proliferation of such digital documents suggests a new benchmark regarding the literacy competencies required of a modern multiliterate educator. And the assumption is not necessarily that each educator has the wherewithal to access and understand such presentations, but it does assume that modern educators know how to interact with learning communities that will help them learn from each other and through discovery how to access such presentations, and then make sense of the concepts under discussion.

There have been many studies of how educators form and sustain such communities. One notion is that of communities of practice, two central references for which are Eric Snyder’s ongoing web project at http://www.tcm.com/trdev/cops.htm and Jeroen van de Wiel’s community of practice “hub” at http://communities-of-practice.pagina.nl/ . Another revelatory notion is social network analysis, such as that explored in the work of Bronwyn Stuckey http://www.bronwyn.ws/publications/ . Noting that the three learning theories with greatest impact on instructional technology (behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism) were all developed before technology had impacted educational environments, George Siemens ( 2005 ) has written a compelling article to introduce the notion of “connectivism” and his conclusion is worth quoting:

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.

Connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity. How people work and function is altered when new tools are utilized. The field of education has been slow to recognize both the impact of new learning tools and the environmental changes in what it means to learn. Connectivism provides insight into learning skills and tasks needed for learners to flourish in a digital era.

Examples of and about ‘multiliteracies’

Returning to the topic of what documents both convey and encapsulate concepts inherent in multiliteracies, I have chosen a sampling for an online course I am teaching on the topic. The course is offered by the TESOL, Inc. Certificate Program: Principles and Practices of Online Teaching under the course title PP 107: Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. It is described in detail here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/portal2005.htm

One interesting document, itself a model of multiple literacies in its navigation scheme and content visualization, is a hypertext dissertation by Ahtikari and Eronen ( 2004 ) describing a learning space called Netro, in and out of which the document interleaves. Although a good example of ‘docuverse’ there are other presentations touching on multiliteracies which are more ambitious in the ‘multimedia literacies’ involved. Some examples which I use in my course are:

A presentation by Stephen Downes on “Reusable Media, Social Software and Openness in Education” at http://www.downes.ca/files/utah.ppt with accompanying audio at http://www.downes.ca/files/utah.mp3 . Downes engages our rhetorical literacy skills in confronting us with such dichotomies as

open vs. closed broadcast vs. conversation institution vs. individual hierarchy vs. network centralized vs. decentralized product vs. remix planned vs chaotic static vs. dynamic push vs. pull Internet vs. television VOIP vs. telephone blogging vs. newspapers duplication vs. obliteration lock-out, lock-in directed play vs. improv bundled vs. ‘just there’ layers vs. channels

Although there is no overt mention of multiliteracies in the talk, Downes speaks directly to the language of technology: “the idea that new media is like a new vocabulary, a new language … This new media is how we talk.” He says that the potential of the Internet as a communications tool is realized when we speak not only in the old language but in the new language, “in the syntax of new media.” He says that people need to have a voice in the conversations he refers to, and addresses the power aspects of media control, how free and open access to technology-based media threatens established interests. Control lies at the heart of many of the tensions mentioned above. His parting advice to educators is to ‘let go’ and let chaos be a part of the learning blend. These concepts are discussed in a second part of Selber’s tripartite breakdown of multiliteracies: critical literacy, or an understanding of the socio-political aspects of how technology impacts all our lives, including the time we spend in the educational sector.

Another multimedia presentation on multiliterate communication (again, with no actual mention of the term ‘multiliteracies’) is Jay Cross’s “Collaboration Supercharges Performance” at http://macromedia.marketing.pr.breezecentral.com/p51746849 . The collaborations he discusses are generally blog-based and wiki-based. One of the first times I heard about blogs was in Jim Duber’s final article ( 2002 ) as editor of the TESL-EJ On the Internet column (his last article before he handed off to me). At that time blogging was a little known idea on the verge of revolutionizing student publishing through free and easy access to web presence.

Now a better known but corresponding offshoot of blogging strives to help people manage all the information that everyman’s access to web publishing has produced. Jay Cross addresses this issue, above, as does Will Richardson in his presentation: “RSS: The New Killer App for Educators” at http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=679449 . This is an excellent resource explaining RSS in simple terms and, more importantly to educators, how teachers can use RSS in their interactions with students and with peers for professional development, or other collaborative or administrative purposes.

RSS: New killer app for education

The significance of RSS lies in the free-access and open-source side of Downes’s dichotomies. It’s diametrically opposed to a journal subscription in that it’s a way that users of the Internet can generate their own ‘publications’ by steering the information they want to their computers filed neatly in folders with easily accessible headlines and abstracts. It’s a way of filtering all the information that flows over the Internet so that you see just what you think you might be interested in. It is suggested that a derivation of RSS might replace email since its exclusive use would avoid spam. RSS works off Internet sites that provide feeds, i.e. code that feed readers (or aggregators) can read (or interpret, like browsers can interpret HTML and other code) and deliver to your desktop. Many sites that people use to freely publish, such as blogs, YahooGroups, newsgroups, news and weather channels, libraries, and other organizations are increasingly capable of providing feeds that people with feed readers can read.

Many educational thinkers and writers are keeping blogs and updating these almost (and in some cases, as in Stephen Downes’s) daily, and consumers of information who want to cut to the chase and harvest this information quickly will get a free account with a feed reader site such as Bloglines < http://www.bloglines.com > and set up their feeds so that they can glean what they need to know over coffee in the morning. This consumer could be a teacher whose students are keeping blogs, and the teacher might be reading their homework conveniently through a feed reader. Or the teacher (or worker, or any individual or professional) could be checking the musings of his or her workgroup through the same Internet tool that is feeding in the students’ homework and the day’s news, weather, and enlightened ramblings of favored net gurus.

For educators, who are these favored net gurus? Neither coincidentally nor surprisingly, some are the writers and presenters already quoted here, and subscribing to their feed at Bloglines or the feed reader of your choice would keep you current in some small sector of educational technology, on a day by day basis. Here are the frequently updated blogs of some of those cited in this article:

Bronwyn’s Web Journal: http://bronstuckey.bravejournal.com/ George Siemens’s elearnspace blog: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/ Jay Cross’s Internet Time Blog: http://metatime.blogspot.com/index.html#topofpage Stephen’s Web: http://www.downes.ca/ Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed dot com: http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

In trying to think of a good conclusion to my article I decided to borrow one. Writing on the need for a “new literacies perspective” Leu et al ( 2004 ) conclude that: Change increasingly defines the nature of literacy and the nature of literacy learning. New technologies generate new literacies that become important to our lives in a global information age. We believe that we are on the cusp of a new era in literacy research, one in which the nature of reading, writing, and communication is being fundamentally transformed.

This belief is increasingly being echoed by educators worldwide. It is incumbent on practitioners in the field to be aware of these echos and gain familiarity with the emerging technologies themselves, in communities with other practitioners, in such a way that they at least keep current, if not ahead of the curve, in applying them to the learning situations in which they practice.

Ahtikari, J. & Eronen, S. (2004). On a journey towards web literacy–The electronic learning space Netro. A dissertation submitted at the University of Jyvaskyla Department of Languages. Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://kielikompassi.jyu.fi/resurssikartta/netro/gradu/index.shtml .

Duber, Jim. (2002). Mad blogs and Englishmen. TESL-EJ 6, 2 (On the Internet). Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej22/int.html

Leu, D., Kinzer, C. Coiro, J. & Cammack, D. (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the Internet and other information and communication technologies. In Ruddell, R. & Unraued, N. (Eds.). Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th edition). International Reading Association http://www.reading.org/publications/bbv/books/bk502/toc.html . Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://www.reading.org/Library/Retrieve.cfm?D=10.1598/0872075028.54&F=bk502-54-Leu.pdf

Murray, D. (2000). Changing technology, changing literacy communities? Language Learning & Technology, 4 , 2: 43-58. Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num2/murray/

New London Group. (1996). A Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66 (1). Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/A_Pedagogy_of_Multiliteracies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm /p>

New London Group. (n.d.). About the New London Group and the International Multiliteracies Project in the Education Australia Online. Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://edoz.com.au/educationaustralia/archive/features/mult3.html

Richardson,W. (n.d.) RSS Quick start guide for educators. Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://static.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/gems/tech/RSSFAQ4.pdf

Selber, S. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 2 , (1). Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm

Snyder, E. (n.d.). CoPs (Communities of practice). tcm.com inc. Training and Development Community Center. Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://www.tcm.com/trdev/cops.htm /p>

Stevens, V. (2004). The skill of Communication: Technology brought to bear on the art of language learning. TESL-EJ 7 , 4 (On the Internet). Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej28/int.html .

Tuman, M. (1992). Word perfect: Literacy in the computer age. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Unsworth, L. (2001). Teaching Multiliteracies across the curriculum. Buckingham-Philadelphia: Open University Press. Retrieved September 26, 2005 from http://mcgraw-hill.co.uk/openup/chapters/0335206042.pdf courses.

New literacies and teacher learning: Professional development and the digital turn

Michele Knobel and Judy Kalman (Eds). Peter Lang, New York, etc., 2016, 262 pp. New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies series, vol. 74. ISBN 978-1-4331-2912-4 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-4331-2911-7 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-4541-9193-3 (ePUB), ISBN 978-1-4539-1823-4 (ePDF)

• Book Review
• Published: 02 April 2021
• Volume 67 , pages 257–263, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Ulrike Hanemann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6235-9607 1  

5423 Accesses

Explore all metrics

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

There is general agreement that teachers play a critical role in improving learning. For that reason, teacher learning through professional development has increasingly been one of the key concerns of educational authorities for some time. High hopes are now being placed on digital technologies to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Hence, in recent years the focus of attention to improve the effectiveness of professional development has moved towards the potential of digital technologies to enhance and enrich learning environments for teachers, too. However, when it comes to teachers’ learning, the much-promoted learner-centred approach has still to be realised. Teachers are often seen as trainees rather than as learners themselves who benefit best from “teacher-centred” and practice-oriented professional development opportunities.

There is a growing body of research that points to coaching and collaborative and technology-based approaches as effective ways of supporting teachers’ professional growth (e.g. Burns and Lawrie 2015; Gaible and Burns 2005; Kraft, Blazar and Hogan 2018; Ostrand, Seylar and Luke 2020). Footnote 1 Moreover, in-service teacher training and professional development that has been able to positively influence teachers’ and students’ learning is usually ongoing, tailored, focused and practical (e.g. Béteille and Evans 2019). Footnote 2

The current COVID-19 pandemic has increased the level of attention being given to the use of digital means to ensure the continuation of learning. This has highlighted the urgent need to strengthen support to teachers and their professional development even more in order to close existing learning and digital divides. While teachers with little experience in integrating digital resources in their classroom activities see themselves thrown in at the deep end, teachers who successfully tackle this situation have shown readiness to take on their increasingly complex role of facilitators of learning with digital technology.

The contributions to New Literacies and Teacher Learning: Professional Development and the Digital Turn, edited by Michele Knobel and Judy Kalman, offer examples of how teachers have engaged in innovative ways to improve their students’ learning outcomes. These examples refer to projects which used different approaches to teachers’ professional development in a range of situations, grade levels, activities, scales and national contexts – including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Finland, Mexico, Norway and the United States, – and occurred in primary and secondary education, in adult literacy education and in university contexts.

A common thread across the book’s eleven chapters is an interest in teachers taking up what the editors, who authored the introductory chapter, call “new literacies” in response to the “digital turn” (p. 5). This interest is essentially about digitally mediated literacy and learning practices that have been examined from a sociocultural (New Literacy Studies) orientation and are characterised by a new “ethos” (p. 6). This ethos recognises the complexity of teaching and its situatedness in classrooms, schools and communities, and favours ways of teacher learning that contribute to an enriching professional practice. It further involves a deep understanding of teaching as a social practice and of the potential of digital technologies to become part of meaningful and creative learning experiences for both teachers and their learners.

In their introductory Chapter 1, Knobel and Kalman provide an overview of teacher learning, digital technologies and new literacies. They start from a critical review of research on teachers’ professional development. In their view, this research often pays too little attention to the complex systems within which teachers work, and puts too much emphasis on “quick fixes” (p. 4). They criticise that academic literature “has been dominated by ‘education technology’ accounts of ‘upskilling’ teachers” (p. 4) with regard to using and learning about digital technologies in professional development. In opposition to this, the authors discuss the study of “new literacies” as one alternative response to the “digital turn”. This involves a better understanding of new – digitally mediated or produced – literacy practices as social practices, and how teachers can take these up in their classrooms technologically and in terms of a different “ethos”. Digital technologies and digital practices are considered as being just one element of developing transformative teaching and learning approaches “that center-stage collaborative and social learning” (p. 8) as an open process.

Knobel and Kalman particularly emphasise the importance of social learning and a participatory culture present in the examples of professional learning or development that are showcased in the chapters of the book. While the various contributors’ experiences refer to different aspects of using various digital resources, all chapter authors share the view that “digital stuff” is not of central concern. The focus of their discussions about using new digital practices in literacy and learning is on “the pedagogical orientations, collaborative and maker learning theories, the complexities of teachers’ workplaces, among many other contributing factors” (p. 12).

In Chapter 2, Oscar Hernández Razo, Victor Rendón Cazales and Judy Kalman illustrate the experience of a professional development programme designed by the Mexican Laboratory for Education, Technology and Society (LETS) to explore how junior high school teachers in Mexico City might include technology in their practice. The centrepiece of their professional development proposal is the concept and practice of accompaniment that encourages teachers to reflect on their practice while learning to use digital technology in their teaching. The accompaniment approach is built on five interrelated aspects: continuity, collaboration, reflection, construction and working in the classroom. The lessons drawn from this experience include that the use of digital technology in innovative ways requires working with teachers to broaden their understanding of how digital technology can help transform their work with learners, and that professional development requires time to collectively explore, create and review activity designs for the classroom.

In Chapter 3, Susi Bostock, Kathleen Lisi-Neumann and Melissa Collucci describe the professional learning journey of two primary education teachers (Bostock and Lisi-Neumann) in the United States with the development of upcycled products (by means of YouTube and popular culture) and a reading programme. By embracing Thirdspace Footnote 3 theory and pedagogy, they created an additional learning space between the classroom and home that welcomed experiences, practices, knowledge and skills of the students and their families. This required “a shift in thinking about where learning takes place, the roles of teachers and students and the cultural changes that promote and result from learning” (p. 61). For these two teachers, embracing “do-it-ourselves approaches” to professional learning has been a reciprocal process of learning from their students, while at the same time supporting their learning as it unfolded. They conclude that their Thirdspace classroom approach allowed for a professional growth that would not have been possible in a pre-packaged one-day training workshop.

The experience of innovative and collaborative learning within a whole-school project in Canada is presented by Heather Lotherington, Stephanie Fisher, Jennifer Jenson and Laura Mae Lindo in Chapter 4. A teacher–university action research project to develop pedagogies for multimodal literacy practices resulted in a model of professional development as a by-product. This model of in-house professional development involved revising the educational infrastructure and following the principles: “learn together, learn at home, remix the curriculum, build resilience to failure, play to learn, and be self-reliant” (p. 84). Drawing on multimodality theory, the authors share an inspiring example of an experimental multimedia class project conducted by a special education teacher.

In Chapter 5, Ola Erstad analyses several projects that focus on high school teachers’ development of innovative projects with their students in Norway. He advocates for a closer relationship between in- and out-of-school activities, learning spaces and literacy practices. One example of the creation of such connected learning spaces is the collaboration of two student groups from different socio-economic backgrounds on the development of an online newspaper, one for each school, which reported on students, their school and their community from “the other side”. Another example is about providing students with opportunities to cross the boundaries between formal and informal spaces of knowledge-building through digital storytelling. These examples serve to illustrate important aspects of a teacher professional development practised in Norwegian schools today “that is always in process and not tied to one-off events where an expert comes in and tells teachers what to do” (p. 103).

In Chapter 6, drawing on the theoretical framework of multiliteracies, Reijo Kupiainen, Hanna Leinonen, Marita Mäkinen and Angela Wiseman discuss a multi-school professional development initiative in Finland that applied collaborative pedagogy in the attempt to strengthen multiliteracy competence through digital learning approaches in the classroom. Multiliteracy presents a new orientation in the current Finnish National Core Curriculum. In the featured Digital Book Project, which took place in six primary schools, teachers collaboratively designed a new learning environment across different learning subjects based on digital technologies (especially those available on iPads and tablets). The project was oriented by a technology integration framework called Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), which stresses the need for teachers to understand how technological, pedagogical and content knowledge and contextual parameters interrelate. On the basis of this experience, the authors draw attention to the importance of “collective efficacy” (p. 125) in developing new school and pedagogical cultures, as opposed to “top-down, expert-driven professional development” (p. 127). They identify the Digital Book Project as an example of “professional capital in action” (p. 125): Teachers are supported by each other, principals and the eLearning Centre to create new learning environments and relationships – in short, a new pedagogy of multiliteracies.

Professional development in the context of a massive one-computer-per-child programme in Argentina ( Conectar Igualdad ) is the focus of Inés Dussel’s research in Chapter 7. She critically examines the experiences of social science teachers (and their students) in four public secondary schools in the province of Buenos Aires. The goal of her study was to analyse the ways in which classroom interactions and rules for evaluating what counts as school knowledge were being transformed with or by the introduction of digital media. While the observed class activities involving multimodal production were rich in languages and in the critical thinking they demanded, “most remained in the realm of possibility and did not become concrete realizations” (p. 144). Though teachers opted for a horizontal pedagogy, they lacked awareness of opportunities for their students to reflect and achieve higher levels of “more productive and intellectually challenging work” (p. 146). In other words, the full potential of digital technologies remained largely invisible or unrealised. Dussel concludes that professional development will need to “seek ways to open up spaces for teachers’ reflection on and creativity with how to deal more productively with the tensions that digital media bring to the classrooms” (p. 148).

In Chapter 8, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Claudia Mitchell and Marcea Ingersoll explore the application of multidirectional memory-work and the “phase space” as an alternative framework for teacher-led professional development in a digital-based project with school and university educators in Canada. In taking a “digital retreat” approach, the authors organised a series of workshops with teachers to explore productive uses of digital technologies by working through memory in multidirectional ways. In the centre of this multi-stage process was the opportunity for professional growth through the sharing of digital drafts of the project artefacts in collegial spaces. Although the authors admit that their professional development initiative was not fully teacher-led, they see the potential for this work to become teacher-driven.

The book’s only contribution on technology-based professional development in adult basic education is presented in Chapter 9 by Erik Jacobson who was involved in different projects in the United States that took an approach to professional development which focused on the agency of teachers as learners. He outlines three major issues that complicate technology-related professional development in adult basic education: a diverse student population, a diverse teacher population and limited resources. He further presents a pedagogical model that respects the agency of the learner and recognises the social basis of knowledge generation. Consequently, the three examples of professional development opportunities he then provides use approaches of self-directed learning, collaborative project-based learning, and facilitated exploration. All of them used digital technologies such as social networking resources or built a professional platform (the Adult Literacy Education Wiki). The author concludes with the recommendation to prioritise (a) building on the progressive heritage of adult basic education; (b) expanding the notions of professional development; and (c) problem-posing in technology-rich environments in future professional development around technology within adult basic education.

In Chapter 10, Carly Biddolph and Jen Scott Curwood examine the intersection of Twitter and professional learning. Their study draws on data from an online survey, in-depth interviews and tweets of English teachers, mainly from an Australian context, to analyse how the popular social media platform Twitter.com is used as a professional development space. Key factors that influenced teachers’ use of Twitter were agency in how, what and why teachers engage in professional learning, accessibility in terms of funding and location, and reciprocity in how learning occurs and is socially validated. The findings further indicate that Twitter, as an online community of practice, embodies the characteristics of effective professional learning because it is self-directed. Consequently, the authors advocate for the inclusion of Twitter “as a powerful complement to recognised and certified professional development” (p. 215).

Finally, in Chapter 11, Christina Cantrill and Kylie Peppler illustrate an example of professional development that is based on the “Connected Learning” approach and supports production-centred and interest-driven learning in openly networked teaching communities in the context of the US-based National Writing Project. The Connected Learning approach seeks to engage the interests, social capital and future opportunities of students by linking learning across classroom, school, home and community. The assumption underpinning the design of Connected Learning classrooms is “that the more teachers fluidly connect students to the outside world, the more relevant and impactful they make the learning experience” (p. 221). This required the creation of a new ecosystem for learning which included production-centred professional development. The authors describe the experience of professional development workshops with practitioners from the National Writing Project who wrote a short story and created an e-puppet representing one of the characters to experiment, in playful ways, with a process of “’messy’ learning, which allows for multiple points of entry and divergent goals” (p. 234). This face-to-face openly networked learning was complemented by online activities (e.g. blogs, forums, e-courses, etc.). Learning alongside each other as connected teachers and “makers in teaching” through such activities is perceived by the authors as the creation of “shared ecosystems for learning” and key parts of “a larger movement to rethink learning in a digital age” (p. 238).

All the contributions compiled in this book illustrate how different initiatives have approached professional development with a clear emphasis on “professional practice and teacher learning as something that’s complex, highly situated, deeply collaborative and participatory, and that takes into consideration the thoroughly social nature of ‘being a teacher’” (p. 4). The experiences shared in this collection demonstrate that meaningful use of digital technologies in transformative processes of teaching and learning require time, committed engagement, critical reflection and multiple opportunities to learn from and with others. This confirms findings from earlier research that teacher learning and professional development initiatives are successful when implemented in everyday practice at one’s own institution and in cooperation with colleagues. While in many contexts, particularly within the current pandemic, professional development increasingly needs to take place in digital environments, learning how to use and integrate digital technologies in classroom activities cannot become the dominant and sole dimension of empowering and transformative teacher learning. The contributions in this book testify to how this can be avoided, and even more, how these new technologies can be creatively taken up and meaningfully used in literacy and learning practices across different learning spaces.

This book is of interest for all those who are engaged in pre-service or in-service teacher education in the broadest sense, including academics, researchers, students, teachers, educators and practitioners. It is likely to inspire particularly those readers who feel the need to make some profound changes in existing approaches to teacher learning and professional development. However, most of the experiences are based on projects which are implemented in partnership with universities and research institutions with the aim to explore the educational potential of new technologies. This raises questions about their suitability for daily use and mainstream teacher education.

Moreover, in the Nordic countries, teachers are considered as self-sufficient professionals who are expected to organise their teaching independently and adopt new pedagogical strategies autonomously, a situation that differs from that of the majority of countries in the rest of the world. This raises additional questions about the transferability of the presented experiences to other contexts. In her commendable critical analysis of the massive technology-intensive Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality) project in Argentina, for example, Dussel shows that even in rather favourable learning environments teachers’ limited understanding of the pedagogical potential of new technologies, multimodal classroom strategies and their new role can be in the way of the expected transformations. It would be desirable to see a follow-up collection soon of how such inspiring and thought-provoking experiences have achieved making their way into mainstream in-service teacher learning and professional development in different contexts.

Burns, M., & Lawrie, J. (Eds.) (2015). Where it’s needed most: Quality professional development for all teachers. New York, NY: Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies. Retrieved 17 February 2021 from https://inee.org/system/files/resources/Where_Its_Needed_Most_-_Teacher_Professional_Development__2015_LowRes.pdf .

Gaible, E., & Burns, M. (2005). Using technology to train teachers: Appropriate uses of ICT for teacher professional development in developing countries. Washington, DC: infoDev/World Bank. Retrieved 22 December 2020 from http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.13.html .

Kraft, M.A., Blazar, D., & Hogan D. (2018). The effect of teacher coaching on instruction and achievement: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88 (4), 547–588. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654318759268 .

Ostrand, K.V., Seylar, J., & Luke, C. (2020). Prevalence of coaching and approaches to supporting coaching in education . Wahsnington, DC: Digital Promise. Retrieved 22 December 2020 from http://digitalpromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Prevalence_of_Coaching_Report.pdf .

Béteille, T., & Evans, D.K. (2019). Successful teachers, successful students: Recruiting and supporting the world’s most crucial profession. World Bank Policy Approach to Teachers series. Washington, DC: World Bank. Retrieved 22 December 2020 from http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/235831548858735497/Successful-Teachers-Successful-Students-Recruiting-and-Supporting-Society-s-Most-Crucial-Profession.pdf .

They explain that their choice of spelling it like this “ – one word, capital T –” is deliberate, because their “classroom work aligns closely with the sentiment … that embracing this complicated theory in the practical world of the classroom means we work tirelessly towards creating metaphorical and actual “spaces” for learning that extend beyond typical classroom mandates and expectations” (p. 46).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Independent International Literacy and Education Specialist, Hamburg, Germany

Ulrike Hanemann

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ulrike Hanemann .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Hanemann, U. New literacies and teacher learning: Professional development and the digital turn. Int Rev Educ 67 , 257–263 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09899-6

Download citation

Accepted : 25 March 2021

Published : 02 April 2021

Issue Date : April 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09899-6

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

The Learning Captain

is a blog discussing issues that in one way or another affects educational delivery and uplifts awareness. It features articles that helps change and improve front-liner's outlook and values for the betterment of institutional culture from the school, the community, onwards. It believes that education apart from being the greatest social equalizer is the key for the eradication of abject poverty.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Multi-literate teachers for a multi-literate citizenry, no comments:.

Post a Comment

Selected DepEd Orders and Memoranda

• Guidelines on the Recruitment, Selection and Placement of Personnel Pursuant to the DepEd Rationalization Program Under Executive Order 366 s. 2004- DO 50, s. 2014
• Amendments and Additional Provisions to DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2007 (Institutionalization of the Supreme Pupil Government in All Elementary Schools Nationwide)- DO 48, s. 2014
• Constitution and By-Laws of the Supreme Pupil Government and Supreme Student Government in Elementary and Secondary Schools- DO 47, s. 2014
• Guidelines on the Implementation of the Alternative Learning System for Persons With Disability (ALS for PWD) Program- DO 46, s. 2014
• Protocols for Travel Authority Requests for Official Travel Abroad- DO 43, s. 2014
• Guidelines on Resolving School Year (SY) 2014-2015 Learner Information System (LIS) Data Issues- DO 42, s. 2014
• CLARIFICATION TO DEPED ORDER NO. 20, S. 2014 (Additional Information and Corrigendum to DepEd Order No. 31, s. 2012)- DO 41, s. 2014
• Establishment, Merging, Conversion, and Naming and Renaming of Public Schools, and Separation of Public School Annexes in Basic Education- DO 40, s. 2014
• Implementation of the Flexi-Time Work Schedule for the Non-Academic Personnel of the Department of Education- DO 31, s. 2014
• Corrigendum to DepEd Order 53, s. 2013 on the Implementation of the DepEd Rationalization Plan- DO 27, s. 2014
• Guidelines on the Utilization of the Human Resource Training and Development (HRTD) Funds for FY 2014- DO 25, s. 2014
• Additional Information and Corrigendum to DepEd Order No. 31, s. 2012 (Policy Guidelines on the Implementation of Grades 1 to 10 of the K to 12 Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) Effective School Year 2012-2013)- DO 20, s. 2014
• Guidelines on the Abot-Alam Program- DO 17, s. 2014
• Guidelines on the Utilization of Downloaded Funds for Adopt-A-School Program- DO 16, s. 2014
• Hiring Guidelines for Teacher I Positions Effective School Year (SY) 2014-2015- DO 14, s. 2014
• Implementing Guidelines on the Direct Release of Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE) Allocations of Schools to the Respective Implementing Units- DO 12, s. 2014
• Amendment to DepEd Order No. 50, s. 2013 (Additional Provisions to DepEd Order No. 59, s. 2012 – Revised Implementing Guidelines on the Selection and Hiring of ALS Literacy Volunteers)- DO 10, s. 2014
• Implementing Guidelines on the Integration of Gulayan sa Paaralan, Solid Waste Management and Tree Planting Under the National Greening Program (NGP)- DO 5, s. 2014
• Adoption of the Modified School Forms (SFs) for Public Elementary and Secondary Schools Eeffective End of School Year 2013-2014- DO 4, s. 2014
• Ortograpiyang Pambansa- DO 34, s. 2013
• Reiterating DECS Order No. 53, s. 2001 (Strengthening the Protection of Religious Rights of Students)- DO 32, s. 2013
• Clarifications on the Policy Guidelines on the Implementation of the Language Learning Areas and Their Time Allotment in Grades 1 and 2 of the K to 12 Basic Education Program- DO 31, s. 2013
• Additional Guidelines to DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2012 (Guidelines on the Implementation of the Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)- DO 28, s. 2013
• Implementing Guidelines on the Allocation and Utilization of the Indigenous Peoples Education (IPEd) Program Support Fund-DO 26, s. 2013
• Revised Guidelines on the Transfer of Teachers from One Station to Another- DO 22, s. 2013
• The Philippine Accreditation System for Basic Education (PASBE) Supplemental Guidelines to DepEd Order No. 83, S. 2012 (The Implementing Guidelines of the Revised SBM Framework, Assessment Process and Tool)- DO 20, s. 2013
• Amendment to DepEd Order No 58, s. 2012 (Revised Implementing Guidelines on the Provision of Teaching Aid and Transportation Allowances to ALS Mobile Teachers and District ALS Coordinators)- DO 19, s. 2013
• Guidelines on the Implementation of the National Competency and Certification 2013 Program- DO 18, s. 2013
• Strengthening the K to 12 Basic Education Program Delivery System for Elementary Education- DO 14, s. 2013
• Guidelines on the Granting of Performance-Based Bonus (PBB) For the Department Of Education (DEPED) Employees and Officials- DO 12, s.02013
• Policy Guidelines on the Implementation of the School Readiness Year-End Assessment (SReYA) for Kindergarten- DO 5, s. 2013
• Amended Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) of Republic Act No. 8190 (An Act Granting Priority to Residents of the Barangay, Municipality or City Where the School is Located, in the Appointment or Assignment of Classroom Public School Teachers)- DO No. 3, 2013
• Guidelines on the List of Approved Supplementary Reading and Reference Materials- Additional DO NO. 119, S. 2009
• Policy Guidelines on Hiring and Development of Kindergarten Teachers- Additional- DO No. 81, s. 2012
• Adopting the National Indigenous Peoples (IP) Education Policy Framework- DO No. 62, s. 2011
• Adoption of KRT 3 Quality Assurance and Accountability Framework (QAAF) DO NO. 44, S. 2010
• Assessment of Reading in Public Elementary Schools- DM No. 143, s. 2012
• Career Pathways for High School Students- DM No. 149, s. 2011
• Ranking of Honor Pupils and Students; Clarification on the Computation of Co-curricular Performance- DO No. 23, s. 2012
• Creating the Schools Sports Events and Activities Unit (SSEAU) and Dissolving the Task Force on School Sports (TFSS)- DO No. 79, s. 2011