ABSTRACT
The notion of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) was designed as a call for change in the field of literacy education. This was in part sparked by the push of media systems into education. These systems have in turn been driven by new digital technology that simultaneously acts as a divergent manner of communicating that extends literacy from simple reading and writing dualisms and into multimodality, and as a means of surveillance (Cole, 2007). This chapter deals with the second tendency in post-industrial civilization, that of cybernetic information distribution and retrieval. Computers in classrooms free students up in terms of their representational capacities. They also makes everything students do electronically “trackable.” This control factor embedded in digital technology, combined with the spread of media into most aspects of everyday life, has given rise to a new form of moral perception. This chapter will explore this perception by building a perspective that deals with the moral perceptions of teachers’ work in terms of the body and the processes inherent within a teacher’s body under pressure from external surveillance and internal desire. The teacher’s body in this chapter is a construction that is suitable for the contemporary politics of desire that allows for multiliterate pedagogy given the conception of bodily design.
