Multiple Literacies Theory: Discourse, sensation, resonance and becoming

Abstract

This thematic issue on education and the politics of becoming focuses on how a Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) plugs into practice in education. MLT does this by creating an assemblage between discourse, text, resonance and sensations. What does this produce? Becoming AND how one might live are the product of an assemblage (May, 2005; Semetsky, 2003). In this paper, MLT is the approach that explores the connection between educational theory and practice through the lens of an empirical study of multilingual children acquiring multiple writing systems simultaneously. The introduction explicates discourse, text, resonance, sensation and becoming. The second section introduces certain Deleuzian concepts that plug into MLT. The third section serves as an introduction to MLT. The fourth section is devoted to the study by way of a rhizoanalysis. Finally, drawing on the concept of the rhizome, this article exits with potential lines of flight opened by MLT. These are becomings which highlight the significance of this work in terms of transforming not only how literacies are conceptualized, especially in minority language contexts, but also how one might live.

Keywords:

• Multiple Literacies
• Deleuze
• becoming
• discourse
• text
• rhizoanalysis

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Monica Waterhouse for her careful reading of this article and her comments for which I am grateful. I also want to acknowledge the technical support I received from Monica Waterhouse and Brenna Quigley.

This research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Heritage Canada's Official Languages Program.

Notes

1. A body can be anything: animal, sounds, mind, idea, linguistic corpus, social collectivity. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 127)

2. An open system is non-linear, not fixed and refutes essences. An open system allows for creativity and invention to take flight in situ (interacting with the environment). An example is the rhizome.

3. How one might live (May, 2005) relates to a way of seeing the world that disturbs verities and ‘opens up new ways of seeing and of conceiving this world … are “remarkable, interesting or important” ’ (p. 22). The word, one, does not refer to a privileged centered subject; rather it can be human, non-human, relationships, a mouth. One way Deleuze approached the question of how one might live relates to what might living consist of? Living consists in difference and actualization. Difference is a process alive with vitality. Within MLT, reading, reading the world and self disrupts, opens up to difference (becoming other), gives rise to multiple understandings of self and the world and creates multiple possibilities of the future. How might one live is both actual and virtual.

4. Individuals are not automatically human.