How We Live Now: Striving for Resilient Repertoires of Literacy

This chapter seeks out the educational possibilities of how we live and learn now. What are literacy repertoires today? What do children know right now? With the velocity of innovation and globalisation, there is a need to be resilient and to adapt to the multimodal diversity that we witness daily as we move through varied places and spaces. Harking back, Luke and Freebody’s (1999) four resources model moved the field of literacy in important ways and privileged criticality and textual awareness at a time when we needed it. So too the multiliteracies framework proposed by Cope and Kalantzis (2000) answered a call for change by offering a promising design-led, multimodal pedagogy for the future. But twenty-five years have gone by and we face a world in which new kinds of literacy repertoires are demanded, which in turn require reimagined ways of framing them. Drawing from my research and observations of everyday life, I have structured this chapter around a series of conceptual vignettes that illustrate various literacy repertoires, and conclude with a landscape view of current frameworks, commenting on the degree to which they are able to reflect and make the most of present-day realities. It is a chapter that attends to social changes as much as communicational changes to illustrate the need for new answers to an age-old issue – how to teach and learn literacy