Another way of categorizing this in a more theoretical way is to group these lifeworld attributes into three domains. The first one is the material differences. What access do we have to resources, from the point of view of the way we are born into particular families, for example, our class background? What access do we have to jobs and employment and social status? Our neighborhood and the regions in which we live and access social resources, which we call locale. Then, of course, the family that we're born into. What kinds of relationships of domesticity and co-habitation or that community, in fact, that provides family. So, those three things class, locale and family are the material differences that we're all born into, and become part of who we are and how we make meaning in the world. The second group of difference we call corporeal differences. They have to do with the body, who we are and who we become. Our age, from child development through different life phases and the peer dynamics that come with each phase. What we call race, which is the historical and social practices based on interpretations of phenotypical differences. And, of course, sex and sexuality, things like masculinity and femininity and various sexualities. Physical and mental abilities, that is, cognitive and bodily capacities that we have. So age and race and sex and sexuality, physical and mental abilities, have to do with who we are, how we appear in the world, and how this influences our meaning making and our practices. Now, the third category is what we call symbolic differences, that is, the way we make human meanings, or what we could call our culture. And this involves language and it can be first or second, dialect, social languages. It involves something called ethnos, which could be a national identity or an ethnic identity, whether we're indigenous or diasporic identities. And, of course, communities of commitment, what we call religion or politics or worldview. And something we call gendre, which is the identities based on gender and sexual orientation. So these things, language, ethnos, communities of commitment and gendre, all of it, involves symbolic ways in which we mark ourselves, and a way in which we make meanings and which make up our culture. Every one of these categories, each three of these categories, all matter. Because in the end, performance in a learning environment involves identity, who you think you are and how you feel about yourself, and the way that relates to time on task, the kind of effort you put into something and the way you engage. Those two things, identity and time on task, make a difference to performance. And if you feel you don't belong because you come from a different class background or your sexual orientation is not part of the mainstream, if your language is not the language of the classroom, any of these things can influence your sense of identity and have an effect on your performance. And likewise, as a teacher, any of these categories could also impact on the way you relate to others, on the way you address issues, on the way you put extra effort into individuals, and some and not others. You don't know how these components of identity can influence performance and practice. But you need to understand that they do, and make every effort that you can to understand each learner on the basis of this complex mix of factors that make who they are. >> I'm going to be really quite specific, now, about one of these categories, and that's the category of age. And it's reasonably important in the literacies universe because what we're interested in the literacies universe is the fact that different literacy capacities develop at different ages. So the starting point is that what schools really don't teach is the first phases of learning where orality develops. So when students come to school, what we're interested in doing is moving students into these multimodal forms of representation and the other modes. And what I've done here is built a kind of a rough outline of a number of stages in literacy development. And I've built the outline out in such a way that it's a kind of a multimodal representation of literacy, not just alphabetic literacy. So, in the first stage, before starting at school, approximately three to five. And, obviously, kids who come from very literate families have a head start in this. They scribble, they draw things, they explain what they say. And, by the way, this point, the distinction between writing and drawing, is pretty marginal. These things are very closely related, which is why we don't want to separate out the modes all that strongly. Then that's a beginning phase. Then we move on to beginning literacies where the student can write their name and put a self-portrait beside it, it's kind of a label, so again linking visual and image. And there are number of aspects here which I have here in this slide of beginning literacy. So this is the point at which we begin also the beginnings of a phonemic awareness. We learn the letters of the alphabet, that these correspond with sound and that kind of thing. Then, in the third step, we move on to early literacies. Perhaps in the first and second years of school, we start doing that. They can tell a spoken story, they can draw distinguishable things, they can read their stories out, they begin to do a bit of beginning reading. Now, at this stage, at this early literacy stage, we're understanding the relationship between a written text and its sounds, the relationship between written text and the image. These are all these relationship things, and by the way, every one of them is not just about literacy, it's actually about these synesthetic processes that we've been talking about in this course. Now, moving on to a fourth phase of literacy, and this is really the lower primary, elementary school, students begin to write texts which are a little bit more elaborate. They use media in those texts, they relate the media in the text relatively closely. And by the way, at this stage, we're still in what Vygotsky would call a complex, conceptual phase, where we're putting things beside each other. That's the underlying conceptual universe. They begin to draw things which are progressively more realistic. They begin to draw things which are obviously iconic in their representation. They can name the design elements of a text, either a written or a visual text, in some interesting kinds of ways. But as yet it's not full-blown conceptual thinking in the way that we were describing it in the previous segments of videos. Now, moving now onto a fifth phase, and this is really from mid-primary to the middle school, this is where we are in a full-blown literacy universe, where we made that very substantial move from the grammar of speaking to the grammar of writing. And we're able to speak in metacognitive, self-reflective ways about the nature of representation. We can use grammatical concepts to describe the way in which we are making meaning. By grammatical concepts, I don't mean the old-fashioned ones like nouns and verbs, not just that, they could be there. But I mean at a high level, being able to describe meaning in the way that we've tried to describe meaning in this multi-literacies grammar. So that, if you like, is a fifth stage. What I've done here is really just a very, very, very rough sketch of these transitions. The point being that step 5 is not possible when you're at the age of step 4, right, that these are part of a developmental sequence which is very much linked to child development, anyhow. So the differences in age then become pretty important. Now, what we also do, which is sometimes a bit problematic, is we then say, well, this person's 12, but they've got a grade eight or an 8-year-old's capacity. Well, maybe they've slipped. The capacity when you're 12 is the capacity to do it, and if you haven't reached that capacity, it's because somehow or another, education's failed you. So the main idea behind this, really, is to say this is the scope of possibility for literacies in each of these phases. And if we haven't met it, the system's failed us. And this is what we should be aiming to attain in terms of the objectives at each of these ages.