Multimodal Literacies Across Digital Contexts: An Open-Ended Agenda

The constantly changing digital scenarios call for flexibility and awareness in students from preschool to higher-level education. While students struggle to negotiate their everyday digital practices with learning tasks that still fluctuate between tradition and innovation, teachers and educators attempt to balance (1) traditional curricular requirements, such as the mastery of reading and writing skills, with the subsequent development of literacy and numeracy, and (2) nascent and emergent digital requirements from mundane daily occasions to the more stringent digital demands of the job market (Bezemer and Kress 2016; Zhao, Djonov, and van Leeuwen 2014). Unprecedented media affordances resist definitions and ready-made formulae owing to increased interactivity, enhanced reality, virtually null limits of time and place in communication, as well as continuously evolving digital practices and communities and the rapidity of evolution and ensuing obsolescence of labels, concepts, and taxonomies (Baldry 2000, 2005; Bateman 2014). Teachers, instructors, and practitioners in the field of education and teacher training need navigation tools, currently in the process of further switching from orthodox and conventional metrics-based taxonomies (such as curricula, quantitative assessment measures, and various frameworks that “categorize” and “judge” individuals) to more fluid learning and teaching practices in the context of multiliteracies and new pedagogies (Gee 2007, 2014; Jewitt and Kress 2003; Vasta and Baldry 2020).