The document discusses traditional literacy as a skill-based approach, focusing on reading, writing, and speaking, and critiques this method for promoting monolingualism and disadvantaging English learners. It presents alternatives such as multiliteracies and new literacies which acknowledge diverse means of communication, influencing teaching practices across subjects like science and history. The text emphasizes the need for educators to adapt to technological changes and explore critical literacy to enhance students' understanding and engagement.

2. What is the traditional notion of literacy?
• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking & Listening
• Spelling
• Phonics
• Grammar
• This represents a ‘skills based’ approach to literacy

3. The English language
The English language is a hybrid language…it
is made up of Celtic – Latin – Saxon –
French – and other elements.
English is phonetically irregular
English has many dialects (e.g. Australian-
English)
English is a global lingua franca

4. What does a skills based approach mean for
your subject area?
maths
• How do you remember key
mathematical terms?
• What text do you have to read
to understand the maths
problem?
• How do you explain your maths
answer in words?
• What is the correct
pronunciation of maths terms?
history
• What is the most important
historical terminology?
• How do we write good essays in
history?
• What are the reading
requirements for history?
• How do you construct good oral
language sessions in history?

5. What are the problems with the ‘skills based’
approach?
• Everything is in English: i.e. it promotes monolingualism
• Language issues become paramount: e.g. understanding terminology
or representing ideas in language…
• The curriculum becomes comparable to a language test
• Textual analysis is consequently the most important aspect of
schooling
• Learners with high English language support in their homes are
unfairly advantaged
• Learners who struggle with English skills are disadvantaged…

6. What are the alternatives to a ‘skills based’
approach to literacy?
1) Multiliteracies
2) New literacies
3) Multiple Literacies
• These approaches recognise a diversity of means to express and
communicate knowledge; including through different languages and the
electronic mediation of language through ICT.
• Multiliteracies, new literacies and multiple literacies support the continued
‘skills based’ development in literacy skills…

7. 1) Multiliteracies
Originally coined by the ‘New London Group’
in 1996.
Multiliteracies was a response to changing
work conditions and the needs of education
to catch up with new literacy skills that were
being produced by developments in ICT
Multiliteracies used the notion of
multimodality as being fundamental to the
development of literacy skills.

8. The pedagogy of multiliteracies
• Situated practice: draws on progressive pedagogies such as whole
language and process writing and engages and immerses students in
literate practices and topics that form part of their community
context
• Overt instruction: explicit and focused learning episodes which draw
upon teacher-centred transmission pedagogies such as traditional
grammar and direct instruction
• Critical framing: pedagogy that draws upon the paradigm of critical
literacy
• Transformed practice: pedagogy that focuses upon the transfer of
strategies from one context to another.
Cope & Kalantzis (2000)

9. 4 resource model of literacy
• This is useful in the preparation and delivery of multiliteracies units
of work…
1. Code breaker: what do the pupils have to do in order to ‘break the
code’ of the text?
2. Meaning maker: what are the meanings that the pupils will get
from the text and how will they make meaning?
3. Text user: what are the real life applications of the text and how
well do the pupils understand this use?
4. Text analyst: what modes of questioning will the text inspire and
add to your classroom?
Luke & Freebody (1999)

10. Multiliteracies in
Motion
Multiliteracies must now take account of
new social media such as Facebook and
mobile technology devices
Multiliteracies can be used as a framing
method and approach for every knowledge
area and interdisciplinarity
Questions about language should be asked in
all knowledge areas and not only as English
but as multilingualism
Multiliteracies is a flexible approach that
shows how literacy skills continue to change
under pressure from technology
Cole, DR & Pullen, DL, Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theory and
Practice, Routledge (2010)

11. Multiliteracies and
technology enhanced
education
Access to technology can be an equity issue
for educationalists to address
Multiliteracies helps us to produce new
models of education and teaching and
learning as technology continues to develop
Teachers can become out of touch with
students needs if they do not keep up with
developments in learning technology
Technology redefines the ‘classroom’
Pullen, DL & Cole, DR, Multiliteracies and Technology Enhanced
Education: Social Practice and the Global Classroom, IGI Global
Publications (2010)

12. Critical Literacy
• Examining meaning within texts
• Considering the purpose for the text and the composer’s motives
• Understanding that texts are not neutral, that they represent particular views, that they may silence other
points of view and influence people’s ideas
• Questioning and challenging the ways in which texts have been constructed
• Analysing the power of language in contemporary society
• Emphasising multiple readings of texts. (Because people interpret texts in the light of their own beliefs and
values, texts will have different meanings to different people.)
• Having students take a stance on issues
• Providing students with opportunities to consider and clarify their own attitudes and values
• Providing students with opportunities to take social action.

13. Unit of work on critical literacy
• You may use these headings to divide up the process of planning your
unit of work using critical literacy:
• Immersion
• Prediction
• Deconstruction
• Reconstruction
• Taking social action
Adapted from: Millard & Adams (1998).

14. • One of the most famous commentators on critical literacy, Allan Luke
said:
• “The single most important theoretical and practical classroom effect
(of critical literacy) is its shift in emphasis from the traditional view of
literacy as skills, knowledges and cognitions inside the human subject
– quite literally as something in students’ heads – to a vision of
literacy as visible social practices with language, text and discourse”.
Luke (2000), p. 450

15. How does multiliteracies affect your practice?
science
• How can science concepts be
represented in ICT?
• What are the design elements
involved with science?
• What is the meaning making and
multimodality of science?
• How does ICT change my
understanding and
implementation of experiments?
pdhpe
• What pdhpe programs are there
that are represented through ICT
or on the internet?
• What ICT can we use to improve
learning in pdhpe?
• What is the relationship
between ICTs and health?
• How can pdhpe be a
‘transformed practice’?

16. New Literacies
• Socio-cultural theory of literacy
• New literacies are about more than ICT and literacy
• Importantly the new literacies include questions about identity,
society and change
• Development from and complementary to multiliteracies
• Opens up textual practice in terms of questioning and representing
everyday life
• Political and social consequences of education can be explored and
negotiated through literacies…

17. • First, new technologies (such as the internet) and the novel literacy
tasks that pertain to these new technologies require new skills and
strategies to effectively use them. Second, new literacies are a critical
component of full participation—civic, economic, and personal—in
our increasingly global society. A third component to this approach is
new literacies are deictic—that is, they change regularly as new
technology emerges and older technologies fade away. With this in
mind, “what may be important in reading instruction and literacy
education is not to teach any single set of new literacies, but rather to
teach students how to learn continuously new literacies that will
appear during their lifetime.” Finally, new literacies are “multiple,
multimodal, and multifaceted,” and as such, multiple points of view
will be most beneficial in attempting to comprehensively analyze
them (Leu et al., 2007, p.43).

18. New literacies and knowledge areas
geography
• How is space represented in the
media and in contemporary
society?
• What challenges our viewpoint
about an urban or rural landscape?
• What is human geography in post-
industrial society?
• How is space managed and
controlled in our everyday lives?
arts
• What can we do with digital
technologies in the arts?
• How does art practice expose
and relate to various
assumptions about society?
• How is the figure of the human
changing?
• How do the arts contribute to
learning?

19. Multiple Literacies
• Literacies as fully multiple and not under the rubrics of the new
literacies or multiliteracies
• Complementary approach to literacies across the curriculum that
includes all aspects of the learners functioning in the classroom: i.e.
sociological and psychological
• The curriculum consists of many complex and inter-related minor
literacies: i.e. statistical literacy, economics literacy, visual literacy,
bodily literacy, historical literacy, etc…
• Everything is not text

20. • Literacies are actualized according to a particular context in time and
in space in which they operate. Given the nomadic tendencies of
literacies; they are not wed to a context, but are taken up in
unpredictable ways across various contexts. Reading is both intensive
(disruptive) and immanent. Literacies involve constant movement in
the process of becoming other. There is potentiality in releasing
literacy from its privileged position as the printed word by not
allowing it to govern all other literacies. In this way, literacies open
themselves to what is not already given. In short, literacies are about
reading, reading the world, and self as texts (Masny, n.p.).

21. Multiple Literacies
Theory
A complex practice of literacies
Do not assume that literacy is fixed or
understandable as a linear process of improvement
Literacy relates to non human objects and things in
the world, e.g. computers, artforms, music
Literacy is a political ‘micro’ practice that can make
subjects areas and knowledge ‘take on life’
Literacies are akin to organic life…
Masny, D & Cole, DR, Multiple Literacies Theory: A Deleuzian
Perspective, Sense Publishers (2009)

22. Mapping Multiple
Literacies
Teachers and students can map literacies
The mapping of literacies should take
account of: affect, power, group dynamics,
digital technology, etc…
Multiple literacies will increase the
affordances and opportunities that the
subject areas represent
The mapping of multiple literacies is cross-
disciplinary, e.g. using mathematics to
understand music.
Masny, D & Cole, DR, Mapping Multiple Literacies: An
Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies, Continuum (2012)

23. Multiple literacies and the secondary subjects
tas
• What are the ways in which technical
drawing can represent a complex
figure; e.g. a Möbius strip?
• What are the technological solutions
to social problems, e.g. global
warming?
• What are the limitations and
consequences of technological
progression?
• How does the application of
technology affect belief?
languages
• How do more than one language
relate to one another, e.g. Chinese
and English?
• What are the sociological
assumptions in language learning?
• How is the language being learnt in
a formal and non formal way?
• How can the native learner learn
from the non-native learner?

24. Affective literacy
• Definition: The term affective literacy locates a broad range of
somatic, emotive responses to reading a text. Affective literacy seeks
out the life principle, messy and complex, threading through reading
activities and gestures toward bodily economies of reading and
transacting texts
Amsler (2004) online.

25. Communication skills
Literacies across the curriculum should help
students to become better communicators
This means affecting the private and public
self of the learners
We want our students to be able to articulate
knowledge problems in all the subject areas.
Literacies across the curriculum should not
cause more stress or pressure on the
teacher, but help to open up the curriculum
for learning.

26. References
• Amsler, M. (2004). Affective literacy: Gestures of reading in the Later Middle Ages.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, retrieved October 11, 2005, from
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ essays_in_medieval_studies/v018/18.1amsler.html
• Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of
Social Futures. London: Macmillan.
• Leu et al. (2007). What is new about the new literacies of online reading comprehension?
In L.S. Rush, A.J. Eakle & A. Berger (Eds.), Secondary School Literacy (pp. 32-50). Urbana,
Il: NCTE.
• Luke, A. (2000). Critical literacy in Australia: A matter of context and standpoint. Journal
of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 43, 448-461.
• Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes on the Four Resource Model. Online at:
http://www.readingonline.org/research/lukefreebody.html
• Millard, C., & Adams, P. (Eds.) (1998). Texts: The Heart of the English Curriculum (Series
2). Adelaide: Department of Education, Training and Employment.