Post-structuralist language theory guides any discussion of literacy today. The forms literacy occupies continue evolve. Loaded words like "multi modal" offer a nod to the complexity of our current state. The days of structural pedantic grammar are relatively simple in complexity compared to today's media rich world. The socially recognized ways of communicating continue to expand. How do we teach a discourse that continues to be ever more broadly understood?
I think we should begin to think about literacies as "socially evolved and patterned activities" that are particular to certain contexts. Our teaching should probably be an examination of these contexts rather than a memorization activity. Any literacy calls us to generate and communicate meaning, and this meaning is only understood within a specific context. Curriculums should guide students sense making. If we do that, I think the meaning for our students will be clear.
The literacies that dominate today are different than the expert dominated literacies of the past. Today's literacy is more participatory, collaborative, and distributed than anything we've confronted before. It's more fluid and less abiding than any curriculum has ever tried to teach. If we ground it in the context of the new literacy space which is online and offline we can begin to make sense of the experimentation that defines literacy today.
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