The end of power, privilege, and prejudice in our writing (?)

It is the 21^st century and we are more aware of the importance of skills like critical thinking, problem-solving and social and cultural awareness than ever, aren’t we???

In this globalized world, we foster learning strategies and social skills because we may need to communicate and collaborate with people from different countries and of different ethnicities, who speak different languages and may not share our beliefs and values. However, traditional curricula mostly operate within the classic literature canon or popular culture by using mainstream literary practices and thereby reproduce and sustain dominant cultures and social practices.

The New London Group’s approach of bringing multiliteracy into the classroom not only intends to include formerly excluded ways to create meaning through e.g. blog entries, websites, visual literacies, and oral discourses. It also helps investigating the socio-cultural contexts and purposes of learning and the designs of meaning. The synergy between the consideration of teachers and learners as designers of their future and the diversity through migration and multiculturalism promotes the blurring of former structures of power, privilege and prejudice in our texts and enables a broader literary discourse.

So, it is a (future) teacher’s responsibility to introduce multiliteracies into the classroom and to motivate the students to create diverse types of texts, as well as to convey the purposes of literacy in contemporary society. With that done, power, privilege and prejudice in the content and form of our texts may be replaced by a multilateral and textual variety.

Chiara