Literacies of the Body

Abstract

Education is at a transitional point: multicultural, multilingual environments are the norm and diversity a defining feature. Classrooms embrace a culture of change, enriched by people who experience the world differently - conceptually, linguistically, and emotionally, with different world visions, values, beliefs, socio-cultural and socio-economical experiences. A new understanding of identities in multicultural contexts requires pedagogies that teach and practise intercultural competence. With specific reference to (1) the author's research on the embodied learning of literacies through drama, sociodrama and empathy, and (2) the projects of The Empathy Reactive Media Lab (eRMLab), an interdisciplinary academic research lab which investigates virtual reality and its educational potential with reference to empathy, this chapter draws on diverse academic research from the fields of education, the arts, psychology, medicine, image processing, and computer vision, to examine present and future pedagogies which foster intercultural competence and the development of literacies.