Learning and Creative Processes: A Poststructural Perspective on Language and Multiple Literacies

Abstract

This presentation focuses on learning literacies in a second language involving a writing system different from the first language. Situated in poststructuralism, a multiple literacies theory is proposed to illustrate that desire is a productive and creative force in learning literacies. Such an environment becomes a site for continuously investing in learning literacies which transform the learner who, in the process, becomes Other. Three vignettes are reported, two focuses on a child and the other on an adult learning literacies in a second language. Implications for learning and teaching are suggested.

Musicking as Literacy: Possibilities and Pragmatisms for Literacies Learning

“…Over the past decade and a half, there has been a signifi cant theoretical shift from thinking of traditional literacy to new forms of literacies (see Cope & Kalantzis, 2009 ;Edwards & Potts, 2008 ;Gee, 2000 ;Janks, 2010 ;Luke, 1998 ;Masny, 2006 ;Masny & Cole, 2009 ;New London Group, 1996 ;Street, 2005 ). This has had signifi cant impact on the conceptual understanding of the literate lives of teenagers, who face the complexities of "a globalised economy, the emergence of new, hybrid forms of identities, and new technologies that are transforming traditional print 'ways with words' and generating, wholly new, unprecedented forms of expression" (Luke, 1998 , p. 306), requiring new ways of understanding what it means to be literate in the twenty-fi rst century.…”

“…MLT is positioned as a third space to new literacy studies and multiliteracies (Masny, 2010 ), where "literacies fuse with gender, race, religion, culture, and power" (p. 338) to form social, cultural, historical and physical constructs. Building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari ( 1987 ), MLT sees literacies learning as a process of constant becoming, indeterminate, unfi xable, becoming other, moving, extending, creating difference and differing literacies (Masny, 2006 ) where learning is an immanent process (Cole, 2009 ), uncontrollable and unpredictable. Multiplicity is at the heart of literacies learning (Masny & Cole, 2009 ), where MLT becomes a resource for conceptualising educational materialism by examining breakthroughs, breakdowns, and blockages in literacies learning in order to note dissonance, affect, assemblage, and transversal creative processes (Bradley, 2012 ).…”

“…The movement is away from examining literacies as products with end-points and placing emphasis of actualising life experiences as assemblages of becoming virtual machines (Masny, 2006(Masny, , 2009. MLT allows for probing subjectivities and representation through affective readings of literacies learning (Bradley, 2012 ).…”

“…Becoming-literate is becoming-other (Masny, 2006 ) through the affective modes of desire that form machinic assemblages; indeterminate and unfi xable, constantly becoming. Desire works in this way as productive vital fl ows, as machinic assemblages of the virtual, where deterritorialisation of striated literacies spaces works through continuous immanent connections with other (Masny, 2009 ) and through the importance of resistance, chaos, instability and the untimely literacies learner.…”

Multiple Literacies Theory: how it functions, what it produces

“…An event, according to , refers to life that produces lines of flight, moments that create ruptures and differences that allow creativity to take off along various planes, similar to a rhizome. It is from the continuous investment in literacies that individuals are formed as literate (MASNY, 2006).…”