Tracing the Erasure of the Iranian Context in Multiliteracies Discourse

• In Event: Decolonizing Language and Literacy Research through Reconstructive Discourse Analysis

Proposal

An important component of “progressive” language and literacy research in the West has been a move towards pluralized concepts as a gesture of criticality (plurilingualism, literacies, translanguaging, …). Many of these concepts have long been discussed or practiced in other cultures. However, language and literacy research in Western academia tends to ignore those histories to claim ownership of such discourses by reframing and marketing them as new Western products. These products are then sold back to the South as “new findings” in the form of books, journals, consultancy, admitting international students, and so on. This pattern is reminiscent of the more overtly belligerent side of colonialism: Exploiting global natural resources and using colonized nations as markets to consume the refined products.

This presentation focuses on the concept of multiliteracies to illustrate an example of the process of discursive appropriation. Multiliteracies, as a research movement was a development of an earlier research trend called the New Literacy Studies (NLS). Conducting ethnographic fieldwork in several Iranian villages, Street (1984) showed how the villagers’ literacy practices demonstrated successful textual engagements as an alternative to the official Western style education offered by the state. This presentation shows how despite the progressive agenda of New Literacy Studies, and the earlier recognition of rich Iranian literacy traditions, in subsequent conceptualizations of the influential movement, the Iranian context is eroded through the knowledge production of the dynamics of Western academia. Adopting a Reconstructive Discourse Analysis approach, the presentation highlights how eventually this research trend leads to the creation of “a pedagogy of multiliteracies” (New London Group, 1996), which makes no reference to the Iranian background of this area of research or to other cultures’ traditional appreciation of multiliterate, plurilingual, transdisciplinary, and multi-pedagogical practices as a contemporary Western initiative.

The data for this study comes from four selected texts, namely, Street’s (1986) Literacy in Theory and Practice, James Gee’s (1986) Orality and literacy: From the Savage Mind to Ways with Words, The New London Group’s (1996) A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures and Lankshear & Knobel’s (2003) New literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Drawing on these texts, I illustrate how the dynamics of Western academia have erased the Iranian context from discussions surrounding multiple literacies, by turning it into “a pedagogy of multiliteracies” (New London Group, 1996), through a four-stage process. Stage 1 is “Discovery of Raw Data” where a Western name is imposed on to the already existing literacy practices in Iran. Stage 2 is described as “Theory Abstraction” and involves isolating and generalizing the concept of multiple literacies, stripping it from the Iranian context. Stage 3 is described as "Presentation as Western Discovery”. In this stage, multiliteracies is portrayed as a Western invention in response to Western circumstances. Stage 4 is “Digital Incorporation” which describes how multiple literacies became incorporated into and inseparable from conversations about digital literacy. I argue that Western academia enabled the above process through its citation and publication practices, genre and theorization norms as well as collaboration and networking practices.

Author

• Renee Davy