After reviewing the literature about helping preservice educators learn to teach with multiple literacies, the authors “found three dominant themes, each expressed as an assertion with supporting arguments that preservice programs should (a) engage teachers in learning about and analyzing technology and media, (b) help teachers develop a broader understanding of literacy, and (c) help teachers understand their own and their students’ multiple literacies” (379).
The authors end by asserting that preservice programs should do the following:
- “We should begin a candidate’s study of student learning within the life space of students themselves by making sure” (383)
- “School-based internships should occur in multiple settings, and at least some of those settings ought to promote multiple literacies” (383).
- “Future teachers need to be involved in programs that allow them to embrace the complexities and even the contradictions inherent in teaching and learning ecologies” (383).
- “Future teachers should learn about, through, and with technology- based media” (383)
- Teachers should use portfolio grading (384)
Key Term
New/Multiple Literacies: The authors blur the terms new literacies and multiple literacies. The only difference they suggest is that new literacies “tend to involve new technologies” (379), while multiple literacies “tend to involve many literacies and modalities beyond print literacy and a heightened awareness of culture” (379). They argue the following about new and multiple literacies:
- “they involve an expansion of the boundaries of what counts as literacy and literate competency” (379).
- are “inherently situated in personal, historical, cultural, and social contexts” (380).
- “involves a recognition that there are many forms of literacy that vary across time and communities—that literacy is a social practice, rather than a set of reading and writing skills to be acquired” (380)
- “involves a view of literacy that focuses ‘not so much on acquisition of skills, as in dominant approaches, but rather on what it means to think of literacy as a social practice’ involving relations of power” (380).