ABSTRACT
Literacy as decoding written text and the literate person as one fluent with high culture has given way to the complexities of new, multifaceted literacies that include the traditional concepts of decoding and exegesis, as well as orality and numeracy, technological and media literacy (Ong 1982; McLuhan 1962). These new literacies also encompass broader notions of what constitutes text (action, media, speech, hypertext, symbols, cultural signs, as well as writing); increasingly sophisticated ways of creating, interpreting, disseminating, and evaluating such texts; and an increasingly complex understanding of the pedagogy appropriate to such multiple literacies (Graff 1986; Willinsky 1990). These changes have profound implications for curriculum and pedagogy from the public schools to teacher preparation in the university, to graduate education for practicing teachers (Readance and Barone 2000). They also make contradictory and
conflicting textual demands upon teachers and learners. In a world of local and global changes, students and their teachers are all now required to read and write the word as well as the world (Freire and Macedo 1987; Barnes and Duncan 1992).
