Into the Labyrinth : A PhD Comprehensive Portfolio

Literacies: Untangling a Concept

A Tangled Web

     Surrounding these definitions of media and digital literacies there exists a veritable Pandora’s box of literacy terminology (Belshaw, 2011) including transliteracies; cosmopolitan literacy; cultural literacies; place based literacies; artefactual literacies; information communication literacies (ICT); internet or web literacies; technological literacy; multiliteracies; multimodal; multicultural; visual literacy; and transmedia literacies. While this literature review will not specifically examine this tangle of terminologies, they are mentioned here to acknowledge the confusion and recognize potential misconceptions resulting from the conflation of terminology (Belshaw, 2011; Spante et al. 2018). For this review, the primary conceptualization for literacy/literacies will encompass both media and digital formats under the term MDL while recognizing that literacies are both an internal, cognitive ability and a social practice, with each requiring action and reflection in contextually specific ways within teacher education teaching and learning. While Stordy’s (2015) taxonomies of literacies is particularly helpful as a starting point for understanding of literacy/literacies, there is potential for further development of generating a phylogenetic graphic to establish origin stories of literacy terminology, integrating information about inherited characteristics, but that required more time than is available for this current review.

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