Welcome to this Literacies Learning Module. Using Scholar, we prompt a number of different kinds of interaction between course participants, all of which use digital media and collaborative writing processes. Our Scholar medium is our Multiliteracies message!

So, what is 'Multiliteracies'? This term captures two aspects of meaning making in the era of our contemporary communications environment, two kinds of 'multi', if you like. The first is the multimodality of contemporary meaning making in which text, image, sound and other media are used together and the same time to make meaning. Just look at a social media activity feed, and Scholar's activity stream, and you will see this mutlimodality at work. The second is the multiplicity of different ways of meaning. Once, literacy was just about correct spelling and grammar, as if there was one best and correct way to communicate. Now, we explore literacies in the plural. A social media post is different from a report on a science experiment, is different from a personal opinion blogpost, is different from an email, is different from a text message. Literacies are about creating a message that is right for the context and medium, and contexts and media are always different.

Scholar is a web discussion and writing environment that supports multimodal literacies. As well as text, your 'writing' in Scholar can include images, videos, audio, dataset, and even embedded web media—which means that you can do traditional literacy here, and also broaden out your meaning-making to create multimodal communications. Scholar is also very social. In this Learning Module, you will be discussing literacies issues and topics with your peers in the Community Area of Scholar. You will be taking surveys. You will also be creating multimodal works in the Creator area of Scholar, peer reviewing each others works, then revising for submission to your community admin, and publication to your personal portfolio page in Community. You will not only be exploring the subject of literacies. In the spirit of our time, this will itself be a very multimodal and very social experience of literacies.

Essential Readings

Please read at least three of the following, citing them in your updates and peer reviewed works. If you have already read any of these in another course, please choose articles you haven't read yet.

• Multiliteracies: A Short Update
• Towards Education Justice: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Revisited
• Multiliteracies: Life of an Idea
• Pedagogies for Digital Learning: From Transpositional Grammar to the Literacies of Education
• A Metalanguage for Learning: Rebalancing the Cognitive with the Socio-Material
• After Language: A Grammar of Multiform Transposition
• The Things You Do To Know: An Introduction to the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• Meaning without Borders: From Translanguaging to Transposition in the Era of Digitally-Mediated, Multimodal Meaning
• The Clause, Revised: On Cyber-Social Meaning

Comment: Discuss the ways in which literacy is changing, and why the word 'multimodality' might be more appropriate today. Read over each others' comments as they come through in the comments area and respond to each other's thoughts by mentiong the other person, @Their Name.

Literacies - The Book (good to read if you can, but not essential)

In this section, we explore literacies on a human scale. In the broadest of brushstrokes, discuss three phases in the development of literacies in our species: the literacies of people who spoke first languages, the arrival of writing beginning several thousands of years ago, and the rise of digital communications media since the last quarter of the twentieth century.

This first update of the section explores the literacies of 'first languages' used before writing as we know it. In the past, cultures that existed before writing were considered to be uncivilised or primitive. In fact, these languages were as complex and sophisiticated as any contemporary systems of communication. And the meaning systems of these first people were deeply multimodal.

To understand more about the nature of these languages,

• read the texts in the 'First Languages' section of our supporting materials website.
• read the following article:

Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope. 2006. "On Globalisation and Diversity." Computers and Composition 31:402-411.

Yolngu Multimodal Meaning Making - Language, Sound, Gesture, Image

Comment: In your exploration of first languages, what are some interesting or suprising things you have learned? Comment on others' comments.

Writing first arrives on the human scene about 5,000 years ago. Over the next few thousand years, writing is invented separately in four separate places: Mesopotamia, India, China and Central America. The printing press, invented in 1450, makes writing an integral part of human societies. From the mid nineteenth century, modern societies set universal literacy as their objective. However, even today, approximately 1 billion people cannot read or write in the ways valued by modern societies and schools.

But literacy is a complicated thing. It spells the death of many small languages. It comes at the same time as mass, institutionalized inequality.

To explore these themes further, read the texts in the 'Starting to Write' section of our supporting materials website.

Fig. 1.2: Maya Writing, Palenque, Mexico

Comment: From your reading and video viewing, what are the most significant things about the coming of writing - the good and the not-so-good? Comment on others' comments.

We live in a time of profound change in the ways in which humans make meaning. Within just a few generations we have seen the rise of new, digital media which are at once deeply multimodal, socially interconnected, global and deeply varied. This is the reason why we need to expand traditional understandings of literacy with a Multiteracies perspective.

To explore these themes further, read the texts in the 'New Media, New Literacies' section of our supporting materials website.

Fig 1.3: From Old Media to New Media

Comment: As you consider the history of literacies across the whole span of human existence, what do you consider the main take-away lessons for the future? Comment on others' comments.

In this section of the Literacies learning module, we are going to examine the purposes of literacies. First: literacies for work. In the industrial economies of the twentieth century, most jobs were low skilled, and few workers needed more than basic literacy. However, today, we work in a context that is sometimes called the 'knowledge economy'. This demands higher and different levels of literacy to be effective in a wide range of jobs, including multimodal communications that include image and other modes, as well as text, and interaction with digital information and communication devices.

To explore these themes further, read the texts in the 'Literacies for Work' section of our supporting materials website.

Fig 2: Charlie Chaplin's Interpretation of Modern Times

Comment: How have workplaces changed over the past century, and what are the implications for literacy learning? Comment on others' comments.

In the era of strong nation states and nationalist ideologies, literacy played a role in creating an homogeneous citizenry. When it came to learner differences (culture, language, dialect, and the like), the agenda of traditional literacy was assimilation. However, in the era of globalisation and multiculturalism and multlingualism in local communities, to be a good citizen means negotiating cultural and communicative differences.

To explore these themes further, read the texts in the 'Literacies for Citizenship' section of our supporting materials website.

Comment: How have the dimensions of citizenship been changing in the era of globalization and local diversity? Comment on others' comments.

The nature of the literacies used in everyday community life has also changed dramatically since the classical literacy teaching of the nineteeth and twentieth century school. For one thing, whereas we were mostly consumers of texts and media (readers of newspapers, viewers of television, liteners to radio), we have now become in equal measure writers (on social media for instance), image makers (the images and media we upload online, for our friends or everyone), and curators or makers of audio (in online playlists or podcasts). We call this a 'change in the balance of agency'.

Like New Learning on Facebook!

To explore these themes further, read the texts in the 'Literacies for Contemporary Community Life' section of our supporting materials website.

Comment: What are the implications of new media for literacies learning? How do we need to change or adapt our practices? Comment on others' comments.

To see some rich examples of literacies pedagogy, go to the 'Literacies Pedagogy in Practice' section of our supporting materials website. While you're looking through these learning modules, do keep an eye out for the pedagogical tags—the icons on the 'For the Teacher' side.

Comment: How is contemporary literacies pedagogy different from traditional literacy pedagogy? (What are your initial thoughts? We'll be considering this question in much more detail in the sections that follow.) Comment on others' comments.

This is the theory of Literacies Pedagogy:

Literacies Pedagogy: The 'Knowledge Processes'

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. "The Things You Do to Know: An Introduction to the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies." Pp. 1-36 in A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Learning By Design, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis. London: Palgrave.

You can find more about the theory, and the practice at in the research section at thesupporting material website, and also at the Learning by Design website.

Comment: Think of a topic. Give an example of an activity that aligns with each of these knowledge processes. Comment on others' examples.

Didactic literacy pedagogy was the founding approach to reading and writing from the introduction of mass, compulsory, institutionalised education in the nineteenth century. It is still an approach that is widely advocated publicly and applied in schools today. A didactic approach to literacy requires learning the rules of the ways in which sounds and letters correspond. It involves learning the formal rules of what is presented as the one, correct way to write. It is about comprehension of what authors are really supposed to mean. It is about learning to respect the high cultural texts of the literary canon. Its syllabi tell you what is to be learned. Its textbooks follow the syllabi. Teachers are expected to follow the textbooks. And, if they are to score well, students have to give the right answers when it comes to the test.

Fig 4: Classroom Setup for Didactic Pedagogy

For historical examples of didactic pedagogy, see Section 4 at literacies.com. Consider also the educational apps that nowadays use didactic pedagogy—when are they valuable? When are they problematic?

Comment: What are limitations and strengths of didactic pedagogy? Comment on others' comments.

Authentic pedagogies were first formulated as a direct counterpoint to didactic pedagogies. They became well known and influential from the beginning of the twentieth century, initially through the work of John Dewey in the United States and Maria Montessori in Italy. When it comes to reading and writing, authentic pedagogies promote natural growth, a continuation of processes of language learning that began with learning to speak. Authentic literacy pedagogy recommends immersion in personally meaningful reading and writing experiences, with a focus on processes of reading and writing rather than the formalities of rules and adherence to conventions. It calls its approach learner-centred and aims to provide space for self-expression.

Fig 5: Rugg and Shumaker’s Child-centered School, 1928

For examples of authentic literacy pedagogy in practice, see Section 5 at literacies.com.

Comment: What are the strengths and limitations of authentic pedagogy? Comment on others' comments.

Functional approaches to literacy focus on students learning to read and compose the kinds of texts that enable them to succeed at school and to participate in society. Their aim is for learners to understand the reasons why texts exist and how this affects the shape of texts. Unlike didactic approaches to literacy, which break language into its parts in order to learn formal rules, functional approaches start with the question, ‘What is the purpose of this whole text?’ and then move on to the next question, ‘How is the whole text structured to meet these purposes?’

For information about functional literacy pedagogy, and examples, visit Section 6 at Literacies.com.

Comment: What are the strengths and weaknesses of functional literacy pedagogy? Comment on others' comments.

Critical pedagogies generally acknowledge that literacies are in the plural. They recognise the many voices learners bring to the classroom, the many sites of popular culture and the new media, and the differing perspectives that exist in real-world texts. They support learners as meaning-makers, as agents, as participants and as active citizens. They use the learning of literacies as a tool to enable students to take more control over the ways that meaning is made in, and about , their lives, rather than allow them to be alienated, swamped or excluded by unfamiliar texts – or simply to be confused or grudgingly compliant. More recently, critical literacies have also become sites for the interrogation and creation of media and new media texts.

Section 7 at literacies.com includes some key readings from the proponents of critical pedagogy.

Comment: What, in your view, are the strengths and weaknesses of critical literacy approaches? Comment on others' comments.

This course includes peer-reviewed projects as a part of the course requirements. These projects must be fully completed for course credit. Refer to your course community and the course syllabus  for specific timelines.