Language Education and Multiliteracies

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Introduction: Initial Development of the ‘Multiliteracies’ Concept

In September 1994, the Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture at James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia, initiated an international project to consider the future of literacy teaching: what would need to be taught in a rapidly changing near future, and how it would be taught. The Centre invited some of the world's leaders in the field of literacy pedagogy to come together for a week in the small town of New London, New Hampshire, USA, in order to consider the ‘state of the art’.

As it turned out, there were multiple ironies in the very idea of New London. By the end of the twentieth century one billion people spoke that difficult little language, English, spoken four centuries before by only about a million or so people in the vicinity of London, old London. The story of the language, and the story of the last few centuries, including its many injustices, is the story of many new Londons. This issue—how the language meets with cultural and linguistic diversity—was one of our main concerns. Then there was the irony of the postcard serenity of this particular New London, the affluent, post‐industrial village which sold little more than its idyllic eighteenth century postcard image. This, in a world where the fundamental mission of educators is to improve every child's educational opportunities—a world which, much of the time, is far from idyllic.

This seemed a strange place to be asking some of the hardest questions we now face as educators. What is appropriate education for women, for indigenous peoples, for immigrants who do not speak the national language (cf. May, Language Education, Pluralism and Citizenship, Volume 1), for speakers of non‐standard dialects? What is appropriate for all in the context of the ever more critical factors of local diversity and global connectedness (cf. Block, Language Education and Globalization, Volume 1)? As educators attempt to address the difficult question of cultural and linguistic diversity, we hear shrill claims and counterclaims about the canon of great literature, grammar and ‘back‐to‐basics’. These debates seemed a long way from the calm hills of a tourist's New Hampshire.

Ten people met and talked for that week in New London. Courtney Cazden from the USA had spent a long and highly influential career working on classroom discourse (Cazden, 1988, 2001), language learning in multilingual contexts (Cazden, 1989) and on literacy pedagogy (Cazden, 1983). Bill Cope, from Australia, had written curricula addressing cultural diversity in schools (Kalantzis and Cope, 1989), and had researched literacy pedagogy (Cope and Kalantzis, 1993) and the changing cultures and discourses of workplaces (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997a). From Great Britain, Norman Fairclough was a theorist of language and social meaning, and was particularly interested in linguistic and discursive change as part of social and cultural change (Fairclough, 1989, 1992). James Gee, from the USA, was a leading researcher and theorist on language and mind (Gee, 1992, 1996), and on the language and learning demands of the latest ‘fast capitalist’ workplaces (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear, 1996). Mary Kalantzis, an Australian, had been involved in experimental social education and literacy curriculum projects (Cope and Kalantzis, 1993), and was particularly interested in multicultural and citizenship education (Kalantzis and Cope, 1999; Kalantzis, Cope, Noble, and Poynting, 1991; Kalantzis, Cope and Slade, 1989). Gunther Kress, from Great Britain, was best known for his work on language and learning, semiotics (Kress, 1990), visual literacy (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) and the multimodal literacies that are increasingly important to all communication, particularly the mass media. Allan Luke, from Australia, was a researcher and theorist of critical literacy who has brought sociological analysis to bear on the teaching of reading and writing (Luke, 1991, 1992a, 1993). Carmen Luke, also from Australia, had written extensively on feminist pedagogy (Luke, 1992b, 1994). Sarah Michaels, from the USA, has had extensive experience in developing and researching programs of classroom learning in urban settings (Michaels, 1986; Michaels, O'Conner, and Richards, 1993). Martin Nakata, an Australian, had researched and written on the issue of literacy in indigenous communities (Nakata, 1993).

Our purpose for meeting was to engage on the issue of what to do in literacy pedagogy on the basis of our different national and cultural experiences and on the basis of our different areas of expertise. The focus was the big picture, the changing word and the new demands being placed upon people as makers of meaning—in changing workplaces, as citizens in changing public spaces and in changing dimensions of our community lives, our lifeworlds.

We decided that the outcomes of the New London discussions could be encapsulated in a single word—‘Multiliteracies’—a word we coined to describe two important arguments we might have with the emerging cultural, institutional and global order. The first was the growing significance of cultural and linguistic diversity (see also May, Language Education, Pluralism and Citizenship, Volume 1). The news on our television screens scream this message at us on a daily basis. And, in more constructive terms, we have to negotiate differences every day, in our local communities and in our increasingly globally interconnected working and community lives (see also Block, Language Education and Globalization, Volume 1). As a consequence, something paradoxical was happening to English. At the same time as it was becoming a lingua mundi, a world language, and a lingua franca, a common language of global commerce, media and politics, English was also breaking into multiple and increasingly differentiated ‘Englishes’, marked by accent, national origin, subcultural style and professional or technical communities. Increasingly, the key communicative challenge was to be able to cross linguistic boundaries, even within English. Gone were the days when learning a single, standard version of the language was sufficient. Migration, multiculturalism and global economic integration daily intensified this process of change. The globalisation of communications and labour markets made language diversity an ever more critical local issue.

The second major shift encompassed in the concept of Multiliteracies was the influence of new communications technologies. Meaning was increasingly being made in ways that were multimodal—in which written‐linguistic modes of meaning are part and parcel of visual, audio and spatial patterns of meaning. The New London Group considered the multimodal ways in which meanings are made in places such as the (then very new) World Wide Web, or in video captioning, or in interactive multimedia, or in desktop publishing, or in the use of written texts in a shopping mall. To find our way around this emerging world of meaning required a new, multimodal literacy.

These two developments, the group concluded, had the potential to transform both the substance and pedagogy of literacy teaching in English, and in the other languages of the world. No longer did the old pedagogies of a formal, standard, written national language have the use they once had. Instead, the Multiliteracies argument suggested an open ended and flexible functional grammar which assists language learners to describe language differences (cultural, subcultural, regional/national, technical, context specific, etc.) and the multimodal channels of meaning now so important to communication.

The outcome of the New London meeting was a jointly authored paper—we decided to call ourselves the ‘New London Group’—which was later published in the Spring 1996 edition of the Harvard Educational Review: ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures’ (New London Group, 1996) and subsequently, a book, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures published in Australia by Macmillan and in the UK and North America by Routledge in 2000 (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000). As one measure of how far the idea has travelled in the subsequent decade, a Google search in 2007 returned 140,000 web pages that mentioned the word ‘multiliteracies’.

Major Contributions: Changing Society and Changing Literacies

The changing social worlds of work, citizenship and identities, require a new educational response. This was the core proposition underlying the Multiliteracies agenda from the start.

To take the world of work, the imagery of the old world of work is familiar—the factories with smokestacks piercing the horizon which we used to see as signs of progress. Behind the factory walls was the heavy plant which added up to the fixed assets of industrial capitalism. Geared for long‐run mass production of manufactured things, human beings became mere appendages to the machine. Indeed, the logic of the production line minimised human skill requirements, as tasks were divided into smaller and smaller functions—screwing this particular bolt onto the manufactured object as it went past on the conveyor belt. This was the human degradation of the modern factory. It was also its genius, to arrange technology in such a way as to be able to manufacture items of unprecedented technological sophistication (such as Marconi's radio set, or Henry Ford's motor car), using an unskilled workforce (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997a).

Old education systems fitted very neatly into this world of work. The state determined the syllabus, the textbooks followed the syllabus, the teachers followed the textbooks, and the students followed the textbooks, hopefully, in order to pass the tests. Henry Ford knew what was best for his customers—‘any colour you like, so long as it's black’—and the state knew what was best for children. And, in a way, teachers became a bit like production line workers, slaves to the syllabus, the textbooks and the examination system (cf. Wiley, Language Policy and Teacher Education, Volume 1). The curriculum was packed with information in the form of quite definite facts—‘facts’ about history, facts about science and language facts in the form of ‘proper grammar’ and correct spelling. Together, this was supposed to add up to useful‐knowledge‐for‐life. Many of these facts have proven to be less durable than the curriculum of that time seemed to have been promising. Nevertheless, there was one important lesson which ‘good’ students took into the old workplace. From all the sitting up straight and listening to the teacher, from all the rigid classroom discipline, from all the knowledge imparted to them and uncritically ingested, they learnt to accept received authority and to do exactly as they were told (Kalantzis and Cope, 2001a).

The ‘basics’ of old learning were encapsulated in the ‘three Rs’—reading, writing and arithmetic. The process was learning by rote and knowing the ‘correct answers’. ‘Discipline’ was demonstrated in tests as the successful acquisition of received facts and the regurgitation of rigidly defined truths. This kind of education certainly produced people who had learnt things, but things which were too often narrow, decontextualised, abstract and fragmented into subject areas artificially created by the education system. More than anything, it produced compliant learners, people who would accept what was presented to them as correct, and who passively learnt off by heart knowledge which could not easily be applied in different and new contexts. They may have been superficially knowledgeable (Latin declensions, or the grammar of adverbial clauses, or the rivers of national geography, or the dates of European history), but they did not have knowledge of sufficient depth for a life of change and diversity. It was a knowledge that was appropriate for a time that imagined itself as ordered and controllable (Cope and Kalantzis, 1993).

If the predominant image of the old economy was the factory and the smokestack, the image of the so‐called ‘new economy’ is the worker sitting in front of a computer screen. Information and communications technologies dominate this ‘knowledge economy’. Actually, despite the hype, we do not just live on knowledge, as if the economy has suddenly abandoned making things for trading in information and symbols. We cannot live on symbols alone. But symbols are nevertheless everywhere. They are at the heart of new technologies, and especially the technologies of digital convergence—in the areas of communications, automated manufacturing, e‐commerce and the media. Even in the manufacturing sector where people still energetically make things, they now make them using screen‐based interfaces, and these are linguistically, visually and symbolically driven. The production line is still there, but now robots are screwing on the bolts. These technologies, moreover, are constantly shifting.

The new technologies are software rather than hardware intensive, as well as flexible and open to multiple uses. Software replacements are made far more frequently than was the case for plant replacement in the old economy. This means that technical knowledge has a shorter and shorter shelflife. Upskilling needs to occur continuously. Indeed, contrary to the old economy process of de‐skilling, you need to be multiskilled, to be more flexible, more able to undertake a range of tasks, and able to shift from one task to another, as needs be. The key competitive advantage for an organisation, even the value of that organisation, is no longer grounded in the value of its fixed assets and plant, or at least not in that alone, but in the skills and knowledge of its workforce. Indeed, technology is now very much a relationship between tools and the knowledge of these tools in people's heads. Wealth increasingly has a human‐skills rather than a fixed‐capital basis.

Meanwhile, diversity is everywhere in the new economy organisation, and working with culture in fact means working with diversity. Instead of Henry Ford's assertion in which individual customer needs are irrelevant because customers are all the same, organisations now want to be close to customers, to find out what they really want, and to service their needs in a way which works for them. Taking customer service seriously inevitably means discovering that people are different, according to various combinations of age, ethnic background, geographical location, sexual orientation, interest, fashion, fad or fetish. ‘Serving niche markets’, this is called, and systems of ‘mass customisation’ are created at the point where ‘high tech’ meets ‘soft touch’—such as the e‐commerce systems or hotel registration procedures which build up the profile of a customer, and their precise needs and interests.

Then, there is the diversity within the organisation. Teams work with high levels of interpersonal contact, and work best, not when the members are forced to share the same values, but when differences—of interest, association, network, knowledge, experience, lifestyle and languages spoken—are respected and used as a source of creativity, or as a link into the myriad of niches in the world in which the organisation has to operate. This world of diversity exists both at the local level of increasingly multicultural societies, and at the global level where distant and different markets, products and organisations become, in a practical sense, closer and closer (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997a).

We are in the midst of a technology revolution, moreover, which not only changes the way we work but also the way we participate as citizens. From the old world of broadcasting to the new world of ‘narrowcasting’, consider what has happened to one of the media, television. Instead of the pressures to conformity, pressures to shape your person in the image of the mass media when everybody watched the old ‘national networks’, we now have hundreds of channels on cable or satellite television. These channels cater, not to the ‘general public’, but to ever‐more finely defined communities: the services in different languages, the particular sporting interests, the genres of movie. Added to this, we are now watching on‐demand TV streamed through the internet.

In fact, to take the internet of today, the millions of sites reflect any interest or style you want to name, nurturing a myriad of ever‐more finely differentiated communities. Then there is the phenomenon of ‘pointcasting’ or syndication feeds, where the user customises the information feed they want—requesting information to be streamed to them only about a particular sporting team, a particular business sector, a particular country of origin. As a part of this process, the viewer becomes a user; transmission is replaced by user‐selectivity; and instead of being passive receptors of mass culture we become active creators of information and sensibilities which precisely suit the nuances of who we are and the image in which we want to fashion ourselves.

In fact, digital convergence turns the whole media relationship around the other way—the digital image of a baby which can be broadcast to the world through the internet, or the digital movie which you can edit on your computer, burn on a CD or broadcast from your home page or YouTube. There is simply more scope to be yourself in this technology environment, and to be yourself in a way which is different. The technology convergence comes with cultural divergence, and who knows which is the greater influence in the development of the other? The only thing which is clear is that technology is one of the keys to these new kinds of self expression and community building. It is part of a process of creating new persons—persons of self‐made identity instead of received identity, and diverse identities rather than a singular national identity. In this context, senses of belonging will arise from a common commitment to openness and inclusivity.

So what do all these changes in technology, work and community mean for education? The essence of old basics was encapsulated simply in the subject areas of the ‘three Rs’: reading, writing and arithmetic. Actually, the very idea of the basics indicated something about the nature of knowledge: it was a kind of shopping list of things‐to‐be‐known—through drilling the ‘times tables’, memorising spelling lists, learning the parts of speech and correct grammar. This is not to say that multiplication or understanding the processes of written communication no longer have educational worth—they do, but in a different pedagogical form. The problem was with the former orientation to knowledge: first, the assumption that this kind of knowledge was a sufficient foundation; second, that knowledge involved clearly right and wrong answers (and if you were in any doubt about this, the test results would set you straight); and third, that knowledge was about being told by authority and that it was best to accept the correctness of authority passively. If the underlying lesson of the old basics was about the nature of knowledge, then it is a lesson which is less appropriate in a world which puts a premium on creativity, problem solving and the active contribution of every person in a workplace or community setting.

The fancier contemporary words for these old ‘basics’ are literacy and numeracy. And of course, mathematics, reading and writing are today as important as ever, perhaps even more important. However, literacy and numeracy can either stand as substitute words for the old basics, or they can mean something new, something appropriate to the new learning. When they are merely substitute words for the old basics, they are mostly no more than statements of nostalgic regret for a world which is disappearing, or else they reflect our incapacity as adults to imagine anything different from, or better than, our own experiences as children at school. ‘Let's get back to the basics’ people say, and the operative words are ‘get back’.

When we use the term ‘new basics’ we are indicating a very different approach to knowledge. Mathematics is not a set of correct answers but a method of reasoning, a way of figuring out a certain kind of system and structure in the world. Nor is literacy a matter of correct usage (the word and sentence‐bound rules of spelling and grammar). Rather, it is a way of communicating. Indeed, the new communications environment is one in which the old rules of literacy need to be supplemented. Although spelling remains important, it is now something for spell‐checking programs, and email messages do not have to be grammatical in a formal sense (although they have new and quirky conventions which we have to learn‐as‐we‐go—abbreviations, friendly informalities and cryptic ‘in’ expressions). And many texts involve complex relationships between visuals, space and text: the tens of thousands of words in a supermarket; the written text around the screen on the news, sports or business programs on the television; the text of an ATM; websites built on visual icons and active hypertext links; the subtle relationships of images and text in glossy magazines. Texts are now designed in a highly visual sense, and meaning is carried as much visually as it is by words and sentences (Kalantzis and Cope, 2001a, 2004, 2005).

This means that the old basics which attempt for whatever reason to teach adverbial clauses of time or the cases around the verb ‘to be’, need to be supplemented by learning about the visual design of texts (such as fonts and point sizes—concepts which only typesetters knew in the past). It also means that the old discipline division between language and art is not as relevant as it once was.

Nor is literacy any longer only about learning so called ‘proper usage’. Rather, it is also about the myriad of different uses in different contexts: this particular email (personal, to a friend), as against that (applying for a job); this particular kind of desktop publishing presentation (a newsletter for your sports group), as against that (a page of advertising); and different uses of English as a global language (in different English speaking countries, by non‐native speakers, by different subcultural groups). The capabilities of literacy involve not only knowledge of grammatical conventions but also effective communication in diverse settings, and using tools of text design which may include word processing, desktop publishing and image manipulation.

More than new contents like these, however, the new basics are also about new kinds of learning. Literacy, for instance, is not only about rules and their correct application. It is about being faced with an unfamiliar kind of text and being able to search for clues about its meaning without immediately feeling alienated and excluded from it. It is also about understanding how this text works in order to participate in its meanings (its own particular ‘rules’), and about working out the particular context and purposes of the text (for herein you will find more clues to its meaning to the communicator and to you). Finally, literacy is about actively communicating in an unfamiliar context and learning from your successes and mistakes.

Education always creates ‘kinds of persons’. The old basics were about that: people who learnt rules and obeyed them; people who would take answers to the world rather than regard the world as many problems‐to‐be‐solved; and people who carried ‘correct’ things in their heads rather than flexible and collaborative learners. The new basics are clearly things which set out to shape new ‘kinds of persons’, persons better adapted to the kind of world we live in now and the world of the near future.

Work in Progress: The Meaning‐Making Process

The ‘Multiliteracies’ idea addresses some of the major dimensions of the change in our contemporary communications environment. Once, literacy could be understood as the business of putting words in sentences on pages, and doing this correctly according to the standard usage. Now literacies, in the plural, are inevitably multiple, in two major ways. The first is the many kinds of English literacy at work in many different cultural, social or professional contexts. As much as English is becoming a global language, these differences are becoming ever more significant to our communications environment. The second is the nature of 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.

The starting point for the Multiliteracies framework is the notion that knowledge and meaning are historically and socially located and produced, that they are ‘designed’ artefacts. But more than artefacts, Design is a dynamic process, a process of subjective self‐interest and transformation, consisting of (i) The Designed (the available meaning‐making resources, and patterns and conventions of meaning in a particular cultural context); (ii) Designing (the process of shaping emergent meaning which involves re‐presentation and recontextualisation—this never involves a simple repetition of The Designed because every moment of meaning involves the transformation of the Available Designs of meaning); and (iii) The Redesigned (the outcome of designing, something through which the meaning‐maker has remade themselves and created a new meaning‐making resource—it is in this sense that we are truly designers of our social futures) (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000).

Two key aspects of the notion of Design distinguish it from the approach to the question of teaching language conventions taken by many earlier traditions of literacy pedagogy: variability and agency. Traditional grammar teaching, for example, taught to a single social‐linguistic end: the official, standard or high forms of the national language (cf. Tollefson, Language Planning in Education, Volume 1). The issue of language variability was barely part of the teaching process. And always closely linked to this issue of variability is the issue of agency or subjectivity. The language experiences students brought to learning traditional grammars, for instance, were irrelevant; the aim was to induct students into the standard written form through a pedagogy of transmission. School was about the reproduction of received cultural and linguistic forms.

The Design notion takes the opposite tack on both of these fronts: the starting point is language variation—the different accents, registers and dialects that serve different ends in different social contexts and for different social groups. And the key issue of language use is agency and subjectivity—the way in which every act of language draws on disparate language resources and remakes the world into a form that it has never quite taken before. The reality of language is not simply the reproduction of regularised patterns and conventions. It is also a matter of intertextuality, hybridity and language as the basis of cultural change. In this sense, language is both an already Designed resource and the ground of Designs for social futures.

What, then, is the scope of the Designs of meaning? One of the key ideas informing the notion of Multiliteracies is the increasing complexity and interrelationship of different modes of meaning, in which language is often inseparably related to other modes of meaning. We have identified a number of major areas in which functional ‘grammars’—metalanguages which describe and explain patterns of meaning—are required: Linguistic Design, Visual Design, Audio Design, Gestural Design, Spatial Design and Multimodal Design, in which meanings are made in the relation of different modes of meaning. Particularly with the rise of new information and communications technologies, these different modes of meaning are increasingly interrelated—in email, in desktop publishing, in video and in multimedia and hypermedia. This means that literacy teaching has to move well beyond its old, disciplinary boundaries.

As the basis for interpreting and creating meaning in this environment, we might usefully ask the following five questions.

• 1. Representational—What do the meanings refer to?

• 2. Social—How do the meanings connect the persons they involve?

• 3. Organisational—How do the meanings hang together?

• 4. Contextual—How do the meanings fit into the larger world of meaning?

• 5. Ideological—Whose interests are the meanings skewed to serve?

The answers to these questions form the basis for a functional grammar, for naming the ‘what’ of the particular representation of a particular meaning in relation to its ‘why’.

Such questions are not the basis for rules of correct usage that students might learn. Rather, they are concepts that might be used in an educationally useable contrastive linguistics. They are tools which students can use to assess the reasons why particular Design choices are made in particular cultural and situational contexts. They are, in other words, a heuristic by means of which students can describe and account for Design variations in the world of meaning. The aim is to give students a sense of how patterns of meaning are the product of different contexts—particularly, in the changing contexts created by new communications technologies and the diverse and intercultural contexts in which language is used.

Problems and Difficulties: Teaching and Learning

So how does the Multiliteracies view of the changing communications environment and its conception of the process of meaning translate into the pragmatics of pedagogy? The Multiliteracies framework proposes that teaching and learning should be approached from four angles, from the perspective of four orientations. There is nothing terribly surprising in each of these four angles; each is well represented in the history of educational theory and in teachers’ contemporary pedagogical practices. However, all four need to be part of the learning process, though not necessarily in any particular fixed sequence or as neatly separate bits.

Teaching and learning about the Design of meaning, should include a mix of: Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed Practice.

Situated Practice involves immersion in experience and the utilisation of Available Designs, including those from the students’ lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces. For example, this could involve immersion in Designs of meaning that make ‘intuitive’ sense, common sense, or at least something more than half sense. In a learning situation this might involve either working with Designs derived from students’ own lifeworld experiences, or throwing students in at the deep end with less familiar Designs that will make perhaps only half sense at first, but providing lots of contextual clues. Successful teaching and learning using this pedagogical angle would culminate in a communication problem solved, albeit perhaps intuitively, or with an expert's help, or with scaffolded assistance.

Overt Instruction involves systematic, analytical, and conscious understanding. In the case of Multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning. For example, this involves developing a language that describes the patterns in Available Designs of meaning, how we do Designing and how meaning becomes Redesigned. ‘How much does new text express voice and experience?’ we might ask. Evidence of successful teaching and learning from the angle of Overt Instruction might be when students have a way to describe the processes and patterns of Design in a meaningful way.

Critical Framing means interpreting the social and cultural context of particular Designs of meaning. This involves the students standing back from the meanings they are studying and viewing them critically in relation to their context. For example, how does a Design fit in with local meanings and more global meanings? What is the purpose of the Design? What's it doing? To whom? For whom? By whom? Why? To what effect? What is the immediate social context (localised and particular structures, functions, connections, systems, relationships, effects)? What is the larger social context (culture, history, society, politics, values)? Evidence of successful teaching and learning from this pedagogical angle would be when students show that they know what the Design is for—what it does and why it does it.

Transformed Practice entails transfer in meaning‐making practice, which puts a transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites. For example, this might involve applying a given Design in a different context, or making a new Design. It might involve taking a meaning out of context and adapting it in such a way that it works somewhere else. This will inevitably involve students adding something of themselves to the meaning. It will also involve intertextuality (the connections, influences, recreation of other texts and cross‐references of history, culture and experience) and hybridity (a Design has voice, but where does the ring of familiarity come from?). Successful teaching and learning from this particular angle will involve either good reproduction (if that's the game) or some measure of the extent and value of creativity in the transformation and the aptness of the transformation or transfer to another context (does it work)?

These four aspects of pedagogy do not form a rigid learning sequence. Rather, they are four essential elements in a full and effective pedagogy. The Multiliteracies framework aims to supplement—not critique or negate—the various existing teaching practices. In fact, each of the aspects of the pedagogy represents a tradition in pedagogy in general. So, Situated Practice sits in the tradition of many of the various progressivisms, from Dewey to whole language and process writing. Overt Instruction sits in the tradition of many teacher‐centred transmission pedagogies, from traditional grammar to direct instruction. Critical Framing is in the more recent tradition of critical literacy. Transformed Practice is somewhat harder to place, but its antecedents are various strategies for transfer of learning from one context to another, turning theory into practice, and so on.

The Multiliteracies case is that all four aspects are necessary to good teaching, albeit not in a rigid or sequential way. And when all four aspects are put together, each is at least softened, and at best transformed by the others. Situated Practice when linked to Overt Instruction is no longer simply situated—in the mindless, populist, commonsense, atheoretical, introspective, liberal‐individualist way that many progressivisms are. Overt Instruction when linked to Situated Practice becomes more like teacher scaffolding than teacher‐centred transmission pedagogy. Critical Framing when linked to the others becomes more grounded, and less airy‐ideological. Yet, the four aspects of the pedagogy do dialogue with the main traditions in teaching, problematic as each of these may be.

The four aspects represent, in one sense, pedagogical universals. The paradox of these universals, however, is their departure point is from the inevitably heterogeneous lifeworlds of Situated Practice. And, to load paradox on paradox, the other three pedagogical angles involve three forms of departure from the Situated, but without ever leaving the Situated behind. The Situated is the realm of the lifeworld, of original ‘uneducated’ experience, of pragmatic everyday life. Each of the other three pedagogical angles, in its own way, expands the horizons of the lifeworld. Overt Instruction makes implicit patterns of meaning explicit; Critical Framing interrogates contexts and purposes; Transformed Practice takes meanings and subjectivity into new and less familiar domains.

Starting with the cultural phenomena of the lifeworld and always returning to those cultural phenomena, the other three angles add perspectives of depth and breadth. To take the depth dimension, we need to go beyond our reading of the phenomena of culture and differences and measure these phenomena against the deep structures of everyday life and meaning (which are harder to see when you are immersed in them) and the moral facts of our species being. This involves suspension of belief or ‘bracketing’: critical thinking, systems thinking, reflexivity, holistic thinking, working through interrelations between apparently separate phenomena, and figuring out paradox and contradiction.

And, on a breadth dimension, we need to undertake the process of crosscultural comparison; how does this particular lifeworld, our lifeworld (or, to be more precise, each of the layers of the multiplicity of overlapping lifeworld sources which constitutes our daily experience), measure up against alternative ways of being human, of doing culture? Nor is this crosscultural breadth simply the view of a disinterested observer, in the manner of a kind of anthropological curiosity. In an era of increasing local diversity and global interconnectedness, this breadth must be the stuff of practice, of learning by constantly crossing cultural boundaries, of shunting between one lifeworld context and another. Both depth and breadth dimensions are processes for ‘denaturalising’ the lifeworld, of making the everyday strange in order to cast new light on it and so as to have a more informed basis upon which to design both imminent meanings and our larger social futures.

Future Directions: Applications of the Multiliteracies Concept

In the decade since the first publication of the original Multiliteracies manifesto in the Harvard Educational Review, considerable work has been done internationally, including in South Africa (Newfield and Stein, 2000), Malaysia (Kalantzis and Pandian, 2001; Pandian, 1999), and in Greece (particularly in the work of Intzidis and Karantzola). This work has also been represented in a number of overview publications and anthologies (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997b; Kalantzis and Cope, 2000, 2001b; Kalantzis, Varnava‐Skoura, and Cope, 2002). There have also been many applications of the multiliteracies notion beyond the original New London Group and the expanded group of international collaborators, including several books (Healy, 2000; Newman, 2002; Unsworth, 2001) and numerous academic articles.

The annual Learning Conference ( www.LearningConference.com), continues to be a focal point for discussions of Multiliteracies and for presenting the ongoing work of various members of the New London Group. In recent years, the Learning Conference has been held in Malaysia (Penang, 1999), Australia (Melbourne, 2000), Greece (Spetses, 2001), China (Beijing, 2002), the United Kingdom (London University, 2003), Cuba (Institute of Pedagogical Sciences, 2004), Spain (University of Granada, 2005) and Jamaica (Montego Bay Teachers’ College, 2006). The conference now attracts approximately 800 people annually. The conference papers are published in the International Journal of Learning ( www.Learning-Journal.com).

Recent work extending and developing the Multiliteracies notions have included Kress's work on images and multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) and contemporary media (Kress, 2003), James Paul Gee's work on video games (Gee, 2003, 2005), Kalantzis and Cope's work on pedagogy (Kalantzis and Cope, 2004, 2005) and a growing literature applying the Multiliteracies concept to the world of digital information and communications technologies (Chandler‐Olcott and Mahar, 2003; Cope and Kalantzis, 2003; 2004).

See Also: David Block: Language Education and Globalization (Volume 1); Stephen May: Language Education, Pluralism and Citizenship (Volume 1); James W. Tollefson: Language Planning in Education (Volume 1); Joan Kelly Hall: Language Education and Culture (Volume 1); Hilary Janks: Teaching Language and Power (Volume 1); Alastair Pennycook: Critical Applied Linguistics and Language Education (Volume 1)