New Learning’s Updates

Towards Education Justice: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Revisited, by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

It has been a quarter of a century since the publication in the Harvard Educational Review of the article by the New London Group, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” (New London Group 1996). In this seminal article, the authors set out to analyze “the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity.” These changes, they argued, called for “a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional, language-based approaches.” They captured their response with the term “multiliteracies.” It would have been hard to imagine the impact of the article. On conventional scholarly measures, it is the second-most cited article in this journal and a search shows that multiliteracies has been mentioned in 25,000 scholarly articles and books and half a million webpages. Looking back over these past twenty-five years, two of the original members of the New London Group ask, what has changed in the conditions of literacy learning? With the digital revolution there have been enormous changes in the ways we make meaning. Meanwhile, stubborn educational and social inequalities persist and, in its multilayered scope, diversity of learners’ lifeworlds has become a more perilous concern than ever. This article is a restatement of the original multiliteracies argument, updated in contemporary terms and with a proposal for a transpositional grammar for the now-pervasively digital age. The key motivation of the multiliteracies agenda remains, framed by the question: how can literacies educators contribute to an agenda of education justice?

Full text here:

Towards Education Justice
  • Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, "Towards Education Justice: Multiliteracies Revisited,” in Multiliteracies in International Educational Contexts: Towards Education Justice, edited by Gabriela C. Zapata, Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, London: Routledge, 2023.

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