Nearly two decades ago, the New London Group (NLG) theorized the concepts of multiliteracies and multimodality in their groundbreaking work, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Challenging literacy education which overprivileged “formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (61), the NLG argued that conceptions of literacy—and its attendant pedagogies—must be sensitive to the ways “in which language and other modes of meaning [function as] dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes” (64). That is, the NLG not only sought to democratize the concept of literacy by illuminating the ways multimodal literacy practices synthesize linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes, but to also foreground the agentive force of multiliteracies as tools for enacting multicultural, multicontextual social change.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric