Listening otherwise: Rethinking literacy through the multimodal child

This paper interrogates the institutional privileging of alphabetic writing in early literacy education by foregrounding children’s multimodal and intermodal meaning-making. Drawing on dialogic theory (Bakhtin, Vološinov), social semiotics (Kress, van Leeuwen, Jewitt, Unsworth), and postcolonial critique (Spivak, Bhabha), it argues that dominant literacy practices often fail to recognize children’s multimodal utterances as legitimate acts of communication. While acknowledging the importance of alphabetic literacy, the paper critiques its exclusive role as a gatekeeper of educational legitimacy. Framed within Masschelein and Simons’ concept of scholè, it explores how schooling has shifted from cultivating subjectivity to formatting performative literate subjects. Through theoretical analysis and empirical example, the paper reconceptualizes children’s multimodal expressions as dialogic utterances shaped by genre, address, and hybridity. It proposes ‘listening otherwise’ as an ethical-pedagogical stance, calling for a reimagining of literacy as shared meaning-making across modes, voices, and institutional boundaries.