bullet">Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2025. "Multiliteracies Since Social Media and Artificial Intelligence." Harvard Educational Review 95 (1): 135–51. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-95.1.135

Reprint: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures

In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our societ_Y is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: 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.

New London Group. 1996 [2025]. "Reprint: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review 95 (1): 102–34. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-95.1.102

Towards Education Justice: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Revisited

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?

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2023. "Towards Education Justice: Multiliteracies Revisited." In Multiliteracies in International Educational Contexts: Towards Education Justice, edited by Gabriela C. Zapata, Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 1-33. London: Routledge.