Transliteracies

[Page 788]Transliteracies describes people’s mobile, emergent meaning-making practices as well as an analytic framework to theorize those practices. The digitally and globally connected nature of literacy and learning today necessitates a theoretical approach sensitive to the mobile and social dimensions of people’s sense making across texts, contexts, modes, media, people, and other phenomena. Out-of-school learning always involves such traversals across connected pathways—both virtual and physical—as people make meaning dynamically with and in the world around them, drawing on and synthesizing across different configurations of materials, people, texts, and practices over time and in response to emergent phenomena.

This entry first describes two central dimensions important to defining transliteracies: (1) a focus on movement (indicated by the prefix trans-) and (2) a focus on meaning making (indicated ...