A multitude of literacies

This book situates virtual reality within the field of media literacy. This chapter offers a scaffolding for that meeting point. First, the contested nature of what we mean when we talk about literacy itself will be discussed. Second, the ways of thinking about research developed by the New Literacy Studies will be explained, moving to a rationale for how those ideas have informed media literacy. Third, the ways in which media literacy is equally contested, in some ways reproducing the same tensions as a microcosm of the broader domain of literacy, but in other ways differently configured as a site of struggle, will be set out. Following this, an over-arching way of thinking about, researching and teaching literacy as dynamic, will be presented as useful for understanding the literacy practices at work in relation to media, and finally the conceptual framework for this dynamic media literacy will be applied to virtual reality.