As lifeworlds become more divergent in the new public spaces of civic pluralism, their boundaries become more evidently complex and overlapping.
This is why multiliteracies has become so significant. As people, we are not 2 dimensional, but come from many backgrounds, interests, cultures... creating interesting and complex public spaces. It's new type of enmeshed diversity on many different levels.
ust as global geopolitics have shifted, so has the role of schools fundamentally shifted. Cultural and linguistic diversity are now central and critical issues. As a result, the meaning of literacy pedagogy has changed. Local diversity and global connectedness mean not only that there can be no standard; they also mean that the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects; variations in register that occur according to social context; hybrid cross-cultural discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects, or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; and variations in the gestural relationships among people, language, and material objects. Indeed, this is the only hope for averting the catastrophic conflicts about identities and spaces that now seem ever ready to flare up.
25 years later and The new London group hit this issue on the head. I work with upcoming TESOL teachers and we almost say this same language about the shift in education. Now you see culturally and linguistically responsive practices, so that students' languages, cultures, and identities are now part of educational and social contexts. Old World literacy is being surpassed with the support of multiliteracies.