Transliteracies: A Theoretical Framework

• In Event: Changing Dimensions of Literacies: Multiliteracies, Transliteracies, New Media Literacies, and Biliteracies

Abstract

This theoretical paper explores the transliteracies framework (Authors, under review), an approach to studying the complexity of literacies in contemporary times as people, ideas, and things circulate across widening networks characterized by globalized practices of communication, collaboration, and commodification (Appadurai, 1996; Blommaert, 2010). Rooted in the New Literacy Studies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Street, 2003) and following from the New London Group’s (1996) call for broadening views of literacy, the transliteracies framework emphasizes the situated, contingent, and ideological nature of meaning making and foregrounds issues of equity by examining the ways people and resources are shared, distributed, circulated, and regulated.


We understand transliteracies to involve the activity of making meaning across people, objects, modes, time, and space and highlight two key dimensions: 1) the central activity of creating relationships and connections (indicated by the prefix trans-); and 2) the dynamic, multiplicitous, and deictic nature of contemporary meaning-making (indicated by the plural root word literacies). The first dimension foregrounds the centrality of relationships—the activity of creating, maintaining, and disassembling associations across spaces and times—without assuming those relationships in advance. The prefix trans (i.e. across, beyond, or through) emphasizes mobility but leaves unspecified who or what is moving or being moved and how. The second dimension emphasizes the ways literacies are multiple and multimodal, constantly shifting in relation to developing social practices and technologies. There is much to be learned by attuning ourselves to the unfolding of people’s literacy processes and practices across various activities and engagements, over time and in relation to their emotional investments (Lewis & Tierney, 2013) and affective intensities (Ehret & Hollett, 2014).

We argue that in order to understand literacies’ emergent dimensions, analysis must follow textual threads as they unfold—without predetermining the centrality of textual practice; what ‘counts’ as text; or how relationships between people, objects, and texts develop. To this end, we emphasize an inquiry or discovery stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) in transliteracies research, with particular attentiveness to emergence of activity across varied scales of time and space, resonance among artifacts and ideas, and uptake of others’ work and ideas.

While this paper is primarily theoretical, it is illustrated by mediated data excerpts drawn from three qualitative studies. The first data excerpt examines adolescents’ collaborative composing practices in a social network; the second considers adolescents’ embodied and social positionalities and identity constructions in classroom media production involving thematic mapmaking; and the third focuses on the emergence of remix practices among adults in a large, distributed, participatory online network. Each of these data excerpts offers a grounded look at the mobile dimensions of learning across spaces, people, modes, and media using the four analytical tools for inquiry in this framework: emergence, resonance, uptake, and scale.

To account for the ways literacies are constantly shifting in relation to developing social practices and technologies, we need capacious frameworks that take change and emergence as central premises in studying literacies as complex mobile practices. The transliteracies framework offers such an approach, challenging skills-oriented orientations that disenfranchise and limit opportunities for learners.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Nathan C. Phillips, University of Illinois at Chicago