Multi-literacy means Authorship

In educational circles, one now regularly hears appeals to notions digital literacy, cultural literacy, media literacy, and other literacies. Increasingly, the term "literacy" is being applied to skill areas other than proficiency at reading traditional texts, deliberately calling attention to the multiplicity of codes in use in daily life. Educators have begun to realize that these codes are not just another domain of knowledge: it is essential that students to become "fluent" in these multiple literacies to ensure not only their success but to arrive at even a basic understanding of the world around them.

Unity 3d - a free platform for the development of virtual environments

The potential for authorship is a condition of possibility of literacy. The availability of free tools for the creation of 3d environments and mobile apps is thus not merely key to the development of highly advanced learner, but a precondition to the development of any true digital literacy. Just as we would not consider someone literate in traditional academic subjects if they were unable to produce writing, we should not be content to allow another generation to pass through the school system without becoming proficient at coding for the very same digital environments of which they are consumers. For this reason, NCTE's requirement that literate students be able to "Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts" must be taken seriously and at face value.

But, if we take multi-literate authorship to mean exclusively "learning how to code", we have missed the point. Though the appeal will likely go unheeded, the message that we must teach students how to code is being shouted from the rooftops of Silicon Valley. Smaller voices point out that, in the words of Thorne and Reinhardt, "contemporary conceptions of literacy have expanded beyond the narrow, if also necessary, skill of decoding and producing graphical texts." New literacies are situated in a world that is more interconnected than it has ever been, and it is a question of when, not if, our students will be required to "build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought" - NTCE, once again. Consequently, our students will need to get a sociocultural knack for the codes, digital and otherwise, with which they come into contact.

Again, the best and perhaps only way to help our students take this perspective is through authorship of socioculturally aware texts, which are reactive without being reactionary. Here, the ideologies of naive liberal multiculturalism couple with xenophobic ethnopluralism to block the construction of the critical discourses of difference that will form the basis of a new pedagogy of authentic sociocultural authorship. Accordingly, the construction of multi-literate authorship faces not only the challenge of disseminating new knowledge but of enacting ideological changes within the educational system.