This book sheds light on the array of transformative literacies in the Global South, which English language teachers and educators seek to integrate within their pedagogical practices.

In English language teaching (ELT), there is an increasing need for a shift away from dominant literacy thinking, knowledge and practices that originate in the Global North. This collection brings together contemporary research and practice on how literacies are theorized, challenged, embedded and enacted in ELT practice in the Global South. It showcases research that focuses on the intersections of multiple literacies and English language pedagogy, and how these fuse with the social, cultural, historical and political realities of contexts where English is a foreign, second or additional language.

The authors provide insightful examples of pedagogical research and practice that reinvigorate a wide range of literacies often invisible or silenced in both the 'North' and 'South'. These include multicultural literacy, critical environmental literacy, digital multimodal literacy, the interplay of visual literacy and local culture, multiple literacies in ELT racializing practices, multiliteracies pedagogies for teacher agency and social justice. With a focus on the diverse contexts of South America and Africa, some chapters in this volume leverage their unique socio-cultural and socio-political contexts to foreground the literacies experiences and practices of students, teachers and educators in ELT settings that contribute to improved language learning experiences.

Due to increased global mobility and the unprecedented forces of globalisation, the world has become increasingly diverse. We are all witnesses to social, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in schools and early childhood services. Research on multilingualism and multiculturalism in primary and secondary school settings is well documented (e.g. Baker & Wright, 2021; Esau, 2014; Krajewski, 2011; Rowan et al., 2017). Nonetheless, there is scant research in early childhood education and care (ECEC) that informs early childhood educators’ pedagogical practice to respond to the cultural and linguistically diverse needs of children.

In this volume, we attempt to map the territory of literacies pedagogies in the Global South. The metaphor of map and territory was coined by the Polish scholar Alfred Korzybski as part of his General Semantics model in his text Science and Sanity. The relation between map and territory was understood by the author as follows: ‘A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness’ (Korzybski, 1958, p. 58). The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in his story On Exactitude of Science (1935) describes a map that has the same scale as its territory, a useless but perfectly accurate one-to-one map. The territory that we map in this volume is constituted by porous and rhizomatic discourses whose polyphonic voices share the belief that understanding language, genres, the world and life demands attention to diversity. Diversity emerges in every chapter, from the bottom up, from the local communities that are enacting literacies and multiliteracies pedagogies, not as tokenistic discourses but as grass-rooted attempts to decolonize the field of English language education.

The present study sought to examine the ways in which Indonesian English language teachers' use and navigation of digital technologies in English language classrooms develop and foster learner agency. This is pedagogically pursued through the affordances of the pedagogies of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000a; New London Group, 2000) which, as Warren and Ward (2019) point out, 'provides an accessible framework that is flexible and adaptable enough to engage all students in authentic learning, affording [English language learners] equitable access to the curriculum' (p. 90). Indonesian teachers' implementation of multiliteracies pedagogies was examined through the lens of positioning theory (Harré, 2012; Harré & Moghaddam, 2003) and the personal interpretive framework (Kelchtermans, 1993). Specifically, the study examined the positioning that English language teachers ascribed to students (interactive positioning) and to themselves (reflexive positioning) in relation to learner agency as they implement multiliteracies pedagogy. In this study, we suggest that enacting multiliteracies pedagogies is a relational and situated process in which English language teachers draw upon their perspective of English language students and themselves.