Transformations in Language and Learning: Perspectives on Multiliteracies

by Mary Kalantzis (Editor)

The world is changing in startling ways. And the ways we make meaning are changing. This means a change in literacy pedagogy and in what we define as literate. In turn, this means that the way we teach English must change.

The term `Multiliteracies' has been coined to highlight two related changes. The first is the growing significance of cultural and linguistic diversity and the emergence of multiple Englishes. Immigration, multiculturalism and global economic integration make these increasingly critical issues. The second change is in the nature of the new communications technologies. Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal - in which written-linguistic modes of meaning interface with visual, audio, gestural and spatial patterns of meaning.

Dramatic changes are also occurring in the domains of citizenship, working life and community life, which will have an inevitable effect on the way English literacy is taught.

Instead of teaching `received cultural and linguistic forms', the new literacy pedagogy starts with language difference, for language is seen to be at once `an already Designed resource and the ground of Designs for social futures.'

This book presents a further stage in the evolution of the pedagogy first espoused in Multiliteracies, Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures edited by Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope for the New London Group, Routledge, 2000.

152 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2001