Abstract

Traditionally, the term literacy referred to reading and writing. School practice in the latter part of the 20th century added the language arts of listening, speaking, viewing, and representing (Parr & Campbell, 2007). The pluralized term, multiliteracies, used in the 21st century (New London Group, 2000) refers to the many different kinds of reading, writing and text creation we do in a world of societies and cultures that are both diverse and increasingly globalized. In this paper, this is inter-preted to include internet use of all kinds, email, text messages, blogs, zines, scrapbooks, songs, comics, graphic novels, baseball cards, joke books, sports magazines, fashion magazines, car magazines, newspapers, movie reviews, TV guides, game manuals, recipes, projects, maps, diagrams, yearbooks, fiction, and informational texts. It’s all reading, writing, and the creation of texts of all kinds. The term navigating is proposed here as a metaphorical term for the kinds of real- world literacies used by cul- turally and linguistically diverse language users who use and create various text forms for various purposes. Where much of the talk about multiliteracies appears to be restricted to what we do with print text, this paper encourages an expanded conception of multiliteracies, where diverse text users take on and create texts of many different types. The term navigation is used to generate a more ex- pansive conception of the multiliteracies as a way to explore new worlds in new ways by diverse literate beings in the 21st century.