Mills, Kathy A. “Multiliteracies: Interrogating Competing Discourses.” Language &           Education: An International Journal 23 2 (2009): 103-16. Print.

Mills argues that the diverse cultural and linguistic contexts of life in a transnational and sometimes digitized world have led to the development of “multiliteracies” or, as the New London Group defined it, the “new literacies and changing forms of meaning making” that proliferate modern life.  Mills attempts to consider the multiple, competing discourses concerning “literacy” in the decade between the coinage of “multiliteracy” in 1996 and the time of her articles publication to discover how multimedia, computer mediated communication and globalization have affected the discourses around “literacy.”

Despite being written about the Australian secondary and post-secondary education system, Mills identifies a couple of different concerns that are also shared in composition and rhetoric programs here in the United States.  She notes that the tensions in her research revolve around three specific themes:  1)  the controversy surrounding whether and how much to use “quality” literature or multimedia texts in the multiliteracies classroom; 2) the controversy surrounding if and when linguistics should be extended to a “multimodal metalanguage” and whether multimedia texts are adequate subjects for linguistic analysis and; 3)  the controversy surrounding the potential benefits and inherent drawbacks of a multiliteracy pedagogy that considers the values of situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice.

After assessing the merits and pitfalls of each side of the varying controversies surrounding the New London School’s multiliteracy pedagogy, the author recognizes that multiliteracy classrooms are but one of a kaleidoscope of pedagogical frameworks – including transmissive, progressive, genre-based, and critical – that can and should be employed in the classroom to disrupt traditional power relations and provide students literacy education that prepares them  for success in the 21^st century.