ABSTRACT
If schools are not to be isolated from ongoing societal and cultural transformations, composition, one of the expressive literal forms of school-based learning, should harness emerging representational resources. Resources for composition are drawn from available cultural resources, which are increasingly characterised by provisionality. Provisionality and resources for representation are categories central to Gunther Kress’ recent work who views environments of communication as “varying from one moment to the next” (Kress, 2010b, p. 171). Following Kress, the prevelance of provisionality leads us to explore contemporary environments of communication, which we consider as relevant not only for composition but also more broadly for life accomplishment of young people. Schools tend to work with rather traditional definitions of composition, which do not normally take full account of the impact of cultural, economic, and technological transformations on resources increasingly available for meaning-making. Our focus in this chapter is on contemporary representational resources and their appropriation by young people for meaning-making, a capacity normally described as “literacy.” We note Kress’ (implicit) misgivings about the term “literacy” (Böck & Kress, 2011) as originating in a period when spoken language and the written word were dominant. In a context in which multimodal communication dominates, arguably different conceptual and theoretical tools are needed. We take up Kress’ focus on semiotic resources in this chapter and define literacy as habitualised appropriation of resources for representation. Literacy, therefore, depends on the diversity or homogeneity and stability or instability of contexts in which people live and appropriate cultural resources.
