Before we can define digital literacy as a learning outcome in college composition courses, it is helpful to review the history of literacy instruction in America, paying particular attention to the ways the definition of literacy has evolved and accordingly influenced classroom practice.
In his historical overview of literacy instruction in America, Newman (2006) argues that literacy was initially set in opposition to orality and viewed as text decoding. As Goody & Watt (1968), Olson (1988), Ong (1982), and Havelock (1986) argue, orality is characterized as both fleeting—prior to the phonograph, there was no way to record spoken words—and situated—verbal communication is marked by the give-and-take of conversation that leads to communal meaning construction. Literacy, on the other hand, is characterized by its permanence and explicitness, which deemphasizes memory, bolsters abstract, analytic thought, and enables a separation between the audience and the communicator. Additionally, because the written artifact can be separated from the author, these scholars maintain that literacy enables meaning to exist outside of the social context in which it was composed, which is not possible in an oral culture.
The result of these theories of literacy, Newman explains, was phonetic, “bottom-up” literacy instruction that focused on “mastering the relationship between sounds and graphemes” and “taking information from texts on the levels of words, phrases, and sentences” (245). Literacy instruction was thus decontextualized and carried an assumption that language could be taught separate from meaning and usage.
Since the 1980s, arguments against literacy-as-text-decoding have been accumulating, asserting that decontextualized language does not actually exist. In the 1990s, James Paul Gee and Brian Street introduced New Literacy Studies, or sociolitearcy, which maintains that literacy is a social practice (for a history of New Literacy Studies, see Brandt & Clinton, 2002). Key to this view is that the nature of literacy varies according to the particular historical, geographical, and political context of a given community, and even within a community, different subgroups may “have differing views about literacy’s social purposes and values” (Scribner, 1984, 8). For example, within institutions of higher education, a laboratory scientist may view literacy as the ability to accurately describe the facts of an experiment, whereas a marketing professor may view literacy as the ability to persuade and emotionally engage an audience, and a theatre professor may view literacy as the ability to interpret and transform written text into verbal performance. All three definitions of literacy exist within the same community of American higher education, yet the variations illustrate the importance of context.
Consequently, as an alternative to literacy-as-text-decoding, Newman (2006) explains that sociolitearcy scholars promote the view of literacy as the use of written language in a particular context. In an effort to create a “teachable” definition of contextualized literacy, the theorists promoted literacy as genre competence, which acknowledges that students are highly literate in non-school contexts (e.g., in the world of Hip-Hop) and encourages teachers to draw from students’ prior knowledge and apply existing literacy skills to “academic literacy” genres (e.g., Lee's (1995) transfer of signifying discourse to literary interpretation). Kress (2003) adds that the value of genre is that it forces us to “see text – not letter, not word, not clause or sentence – as the central category in literacy,” and since texts necessarily have purposes and audiences, this focus reminds us that literacy is “a matter of social action and social forces” (86).
However, Newman explains, literacy-as-genre-competence can be problematic because it becomes so general (anything can be a genre) that it’s difficult to define what, exactly, these teachers are trying to teach. Worse still, the reaction to this generalization has been to create standard “academic” literacy genres that undercut the conceptual framework of literacy as a contextualized, social practice. Teaching contextualized texts instead of decontextualized sentences is certainly an improvement, but this approach still advances one correct and legitimate communicative style that necessarily privileges one cultural group (i.e., English-speaking middle class white people) and devalues literacies outside of the established standard.
The New London Group (1996) offer an alternative to literacy-as-genre-competence in their pedagogy of multiliteracies. In the initial article and in the subsequent work by Cope & Kalantzis (2009), the New London Group show that communication is necessarily multimodal and literate people are skilled in layering and weaving those modes together to produce effective communications given particular audiences. They also contend that educators should not be imparting approved forms of meaning to passive learners; instead, we need to foster our students’ active engagement in meaning making. Cope & Kalantzis argue that this student-centered pedagogy is only possible if we approach teaching and learning holistically and if we put an immediate moratorium on high-stakes standardized tests and the back-to-basics focus on phonics.
The pedagogy of multiliteracies is a call for a new approach to the way we teach and learn, and key to that approach is recognizing that our typical notions of literacy (as print) or of education (as universal schooling) are problematic. As an alternative, Cope & Kalantzis contend that literacy instruction should prepare students for a workplace that requires “supple, variable, communication strategies” (170) and a world marked by rapid change and diversity. Literate citizens need to be “agents in their own knowledge processes” (172) who are both “comfortable with themselves” and “flexible enough to collaborate and negotiate with others … in order to forge a common interest” (174). The ability to collaborate and negotiate is particularly important because, in addition to recognizing that every person is literate in multiple contexts, the theory of multiliteracies emphasizes participation and identity construction.
For example, I am quite literate in Harry Potter and I’m gaining literacy in college composition instruction, but I’m completely illiterate in fantasy football. My knowledge of Harry Potter informs my understanding of narrative, which contributes to my understanding of some aspects of college composition; similarly, my knowledge of online communities, which I’ve gained from studying online writing instruction, might help me gain access to fantasy football if I wanted to develop that literacy. My level of (non)participation in each of these contexts contributes to the way I perceive of myself in relation to others in multiple contexts.
I find it helpful to think about the role of identity in the theory of multiliteracies through the lens of Sylvia Scribner’s (1984) three metaphors for literacy: adaptation, power, and grace. By adaptation, she means that the threshold for “literacy” changes over time; in multiliteracies instruction, this means we need to help students learn to be flexible thinkers who are able to assess varied communicative tasks. By power, she means that literacy enables people to gain social power, whereas illiteracy “is a state of victimization” (12); in multiliteracies instruction, this means helping students recognize the ways certain literacies grant access to particular communities, and the ways community participation is denied based on illiteracy. Finally, by grace, Scribner means that literacy gives significance to a person’s life because it enables “intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual participation in the accumulated creations and knowledge of humankind” (14); in multiliteracies instruction, this means helping students develop self-awareness and establish their identities in relation to their cultural ancestors. Key to Scribner’s metaphors, and to multiliteracies instruction, is the way in which literacy is a process of acculturation that perpetuates the power structures and social dynamics of a society by defining the (il)literate person’s identity in relation to relevant communities.
The challenge for educators who want to move beyond genre competence and teach multiliteracies, then, is to design learning environments that foster situated learning and learning-by-doing, where students practice authentic literacy tasks, are made explicitly aware of the sociopolitical nature of literacy, and become flexible composers who can move between contexts and communities.
While some college composition instruction may venture into literacy-as-genre-competence, as a field, computers and composition advocates for multiliteracies (Clark, 2010; Daley, 2003; Hawisher et al., 2004; Lunsford, 2007; Selber, 2004; NCTE, 2013; Yancey, 2004). Arguments for multiliteracies within computers and composition are particularly effective because they frequently connect theory with practice, demonstrating how asking students to create multimodal compositions can embody a pedagogy of multiliteracies (Ball & Hawk, 2006; Bowen & Whithaus, 2013; Denecker, 2010; Palmeri, 2012; Takayoshi & Selfe, 2007; Sheridan & Inman, 2010; Selfe & Selfe, 2008; Selfe, 2009).
The fact that computers and composition has championed multiliteracies is not surprising because the theory of multiliteracies is strongly connected to technology. As Leu (2000) argues, “[o]ur era is defined largely by repeated, rapid, and revolutionary changes in the technologies of information and communication” (746), which means we cannot predict what literacy skills students will need (or what genres will be key to communication) by the time a kindergartener today finishes high school. The pedagogy of multiliteracies recommends we teach students the broad life skills (lifelong learning, strategic thinking, critical consumption of information, flexible navigation of the various media that make meaning) required to navigate a society marked by such rapid change.
One way to teach those skills, as computers and composition scholarship has demonstrated, is to incorporate digital tools into the classroom. However, the incorporation of digital tools into literacy instruction presents unique challenges, which I consider in the next section.
For more information about the relationship between literacy and digital tools, see The Problem of Tool Use. For more information on the factors that define digital literacy our current social context (multimodal composition, information, and collaboration), see Characteristics of Digital Literacy.
Created by Mary K. Stewart (2014)