Beyond the workshop : doing multiliteracies with adolescents

Engaging students’ lifeworlds and the concerns of their communities in globalised, semiotic and information societies is imperative with the complexity of multimodal communication (Lemke 2006) in the ‘new media age’ (Kress 2003). As youth continue to demonstrate their multiliteracies proficiency with new literacies emerging from Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs), education - particularly curriculum and instruction - remains largely focused around monomodal, print-only literacy practices, often ignoring their multiple voices. In New Times (Hall 1996), there has been much rhetoric about the role of education in equipping students for the future. Multiliteracies pedagogy allows individual teachers to reconceptualise pedagogy and curriculum thereby addressing adolescents’ complex and demanding literacy needs (New London Group 1996). This paper presents new and emerging virtual contexts and environments for adolescent literacy instruction highlighting one teacher’s curricular interruptions where Multiliteracies pedagogies replaced the progressive monomodal reading and writing workshop. In conclusion, new perspectives on research related to the education of teachers in the education in post-typographic societies of the 21st century.