At present can be considered literate a person who can only interpret and, at best, produce written texts?

Most people have been educated in a narrow notion of the concepts of learning and literacy. Something that sets limits to decipher and interact with the surrounding world and leads to question what does today mean to be literate or illiterate.

The need to review the notion of literacy is related to the constant development of different languages and information, communication and expression technologies. Most of the proposals made by international organizations, in order to define the knowledge and skills necessary for exercising a responsible citizenship in the twenty-first century, suggest the need to redefine this concept. The declaration of UNESCO: United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012) (http://www.un.org/press/en/2003/obv322.doc.htm) considers literacy as the basis for allowing all people to develop life-long skills. To what other authors add the important to consider life-wide and life-deep learning attitudes (Banks, Au, Ball, Bell et al., 2007).  People need these knowledge and skills not only to be employable, but to understand and, as far as possible, participate in all aspects of society. This includes paying special attention to the relationship between formal, non-formal and informal education, and the creation of diversified literacy environments.

In this sense literacy theories not only emphasize the linguistic or cognitive ability to read and write texts, but understand it
as a set of socially organized practices that uses a system of symbols and a technology to produce and disseminate them. Literacy is not just reading and writing a given text, but the application of this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts (Scribner and Cole, 1981).

One of the insights with a greater impact on the review of the teaching and learning of literacy has been to multiliteracies approach (New London Group, 1996; Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2003; Lanskhear and Knobel, 2008). Its starting point has been to recognize that in a multimodal society characterized by the multiplicity of channels and media, it seems fundamental to prepare and qualify individuals from an integrated approach to diverse literacies. Thus a multiliteracies pedagogy will focus on much broader models than just written language representation. It also would focus on the development of skills for personal, social and cultural use of multiple tools and languages of representation considered as social practices, not just in the instrumental skills for using various technologies.

Hence the need to generate knowledge about young people modes of learning and their relationship with the new literacies out of school in order to strike a balance between academic and social curriculum. However do schools take into account the educational background and experience of the students outside the classroom?

In our research project “Living and learning with new literacies in and outside secondary school: contributions to reducing drop-out, exclusion and disaffection among youth (MINECO- EDU2011-24122) we explore if there is a gap or otherwise between what the school believes that learning is (in general, listening to the teacher, making exercises and accounting for a reproductive test or exam) and how young people learn outside school when they build digital trading communities with colleagues and use new literacies.

- Banks, J. A., Au, K., et al. (2007). Learning in and out of school in diverse environments. life long, life-wide, life-deep. The LIFE Center for Multicultural Education. Retrieved from http://www.ibparticipation.org/pdf/LearningInDiverseEnvironments.pdf. - Cole, David R. & Pullen, Durren L. (2010). Multiliteracies in motion. Routledge. New York and London. - Cope, Bill & Kalantzis, Mary (2000). Multiliteracies. Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Londres y Nueva York: Routledge. - García, C. & Valdivia, A. (2014). Media Prosumers. Participatory Culture of Audiences and Media Responsibility. Comunicar, XXII(43), 10-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.3916/C43-2014-a2 - Hernández, F. (Ed.) (2011). Investigar con los jóvenes: cuestiones temáticas, metodológicas, éticas y educativas. Barcelona: Dipòsit digital de la Universitat de Barcelona. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2445/17362. - Kincheloe, J.L. y Berry K.S. (2004). Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research. Conceptualizing the bricolage. Maindenhead, UK: Open University Press. - Kress, Gunther (2003). Literacies in the New Media Age. Londres: Routledge. Publicada en castellano por Aljibe. - Lankshear, Collin y Knobel, Michelle (2008). Nuevos alfabetismos. Su práctica cotidiana y el aprendizaje en el aula. Madrid: Morata. - Macbeth, D. (2001). On “reflexivity” in qualitative research: two readings, and a third. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(1), 35-68. - New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. En Harvard Educational Review, 66, pp. 60-92. - Scribner, Sylvia y Cole, Michael (1981). The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.