Multiple Literacies Theory: how it functions, what it produces

Abstract

At the moment, there are two literacy theories that seem to dominate the research on literacies. They are known as the New Literacy Studies (NLS) (BARTON;HAMILTON; IVANIČ;STREET, 2003) and Multiliteracies (COPE;KALANTZIS, 2009). This article is about a different theory, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) that demarcates itself from them ontologically and epistemologically. It will also highlight aspects of NLS and Multiliteracies in order to point out the differences with MLT. This article aims to put forward the major concepts that underlie this theory and present vignettes from a study examining how perceptions of writing systems in multilingual children contribute to reading, reading the world and self as texts.

Musicking as Literacy: Possibilities and Pragmatisms for Literacies Learning

“…Change, particularly technological change, opens new possibilities that are limited only by the imagination. Further adding to the milieu of literacies conceptualising is the work of Masny ( 2009Masny ( , 2010 and others on a Deleuzian-informed multiple literacies theory (MLT). 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.…”

“…Further adding to the milieu of literacies conceptualising is the work of Masny ( 2009Masny ( , 2010 and others on a Deleuzian-informed multiple literacies theory (MLT). 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.…”

“…There are multiple links between the acts of language and musicking (Fiske, 2008 ), creating a multiplicity of relationships between the performers of language and musicking. For example, language is a bounded, territorialised system (Masny, 2010 ), similar to the territorialisation of music systems. It is in the links between language and music, where Small ( 1998 ) explains "the meaning of the act lies.…”

“…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. (Re)thinking literacies learners involves learning to read literacies learners as reading the world, the word and the self as texts in ways that are intensive, immanent and transgressively disruptive (Masny, 2010 ). Literacies learning might then be (re) constructed to allow for new ways of becoming with the world that move beyond the limiting spaces of narrow conceptions of school-based defi nitions of literacy and work towards unbounding and deterritorialising language itself.…”

“…Literacies learning is nomadic, where literacies are taken up in unpredictable ways in various contexts (Masny, 2010 ). 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.…”