Reconstructing Technoliteracy: A Multiple Literacies Approach

Abstract

Much has been written that describes the history of the concept of ‘technological literacy’ and, more recently, a literature attempting to chart emancipatory technoliteracies has emerged over the last decade. Our article begins with a brief examination of the meanings that ‘technology’ and ‘literacy’ have received towards achieving insight into what sort of knowledge and skills ‘technoliteracy’ hails. We then summarize the broad trajectories of development in hegemonic programs of contemporary technoliteracy from their arguable origins as ‘computer literacy’ in the A Nation at Risk report of 1983 up to the present call for integration of technology across the curriculum and the standards-based approach of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and 2004's US National Educational Technology Plan. In contradistinction, we reveal how this approach has been tacitly challenged at the global institutional level through the United Nations' Project 2000+, and theorize how this might link up with a democratic project of re-visioning education though multiple literacies. Finally, in closing, we think about what it will mean to reconstruct ‘technoliteracy’ broadly in this manner and conclude with a call for new critical pedagogies that can inform and be informed by the counterhegemonic idea of ‘multiple technoliteracies’.