Three Conceptions of Literacy: Media, Narrative, and Gaming Literacies

In the latter half of the 20th century, scholars began to contest traditional conceptions of literacy. According to these challenges, meaning is an interactive process achieved by a reader who applies their own knowledge and background experiences. Over the same period, new media technologies have emerged, leading scholars to expand their conceptions of literacy to consider how citizens make meaning in these new contexts. Literacy practices—reading, writing, and creating—are now understood as multiple and diverse practices that individuals enact beyond educational settings into other spaces of home and community. Literacy is sociocultural and diverse, involving individuals’ use of values, relationships, and things from their lives, discourses, or culturally imbedded practices. Literacy also involves multiliteracies or the use of different kinds of literacies for different purposes in various life circumstances. Literacy then is not isolated to a mere skill but involves a dynamic process that moves across various communities, discourses, and cultures, and it includes more than just language. Three genres of literacy included in this article are Media Literacy, narrative literacy, and Gaming Literacy. Media literacy is the ability to access, interpret, and produce public communication in various forms. Media literacy can be broadly understood as an approach to education that teaches students to analyze, evaluate, and create media messages using a variety of media platforms and tools. A direct offshoot of media literacy is Critical Media Literacy. Critical media literacy looks more closely at the power dimensions behind media messages and tends to emphasize structural features of media, such as considering the corporate interests supporting news organizations that construct most political news, advertising, and other forms of entertainment. Next is narrative literacy, which involves the storying of experiences, through different modes of expression or literacy practices. Narrative literacies as diverse behaviors and practices involve individuals understanding, speaking, and/or writing their world. In storying lives, sometimes individuals’ bodies (embodiment) are used in different ways to narrate. Embodiment can involve using tattoos or remembered bodily practices. Artifactual Literacies, also as practices that involve individuals’ narration of their lives, involve the use of artifacts or objects to mediate experiences. Last, gaming literacy involves the use of gamification and game-based learning as a new form of literacy and is situated in the context of game design. Game-based learning, including video games, uses games to meet learning outcomes and provides opportunities for self-directed learning where emotion and imagination situate literacy within a multimodal context. In this article, we consider how individuals make meaning through their interactions with media, gaming, and artifacts. As genres, each of the literacies we present contain particular descriptions and characteristics and are utilized by individuals for different purposes and practices.