Towards Education Justice: The Multiliteracies Project Revisited

It has been a quarter of a century since the publication in the Harvard Educational Review of the article by the New London Group (1996), “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” and the birth of the “multiliteracies” approach to teaching and learning. Since then, “multiliteracies” has been mentioned in 25,000 scholarly articles and books and half a million webpages. Looking back over these past twenty-five years, in this chapter, two original members of the New London Group reflect on the changes the original conceptualizations have experienced, focusing on several of the most significant. This chapter is a theoretical restatement of the original multiliteracies argument, updated in contemporary terms and with a proposal for a transpositional grammar for the now-pervasively digital age. For all the change, the key motivation of the multiliteracies agenda remains, framed by this question: How can literacies educators contribute to an agenda of education justice.