This article argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal literacy’s sociomaterial character: that it is constituted within more-than-human assemblages of people, texts, technologies, practices, and infrastructures, rather than in the cognitive capacity of the individual. Rather than asking what new literacies Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) demands, it asks what LLMs reveal about literacy itself. This analysis draws on the sociomaterial tradition in science and technology studies, including actor-network theory, spatial perspectives, and postdigital literacy research. It reconceptualises literacy as emergent practice within assemblages, arguing that competence frameworks, by centring the individual, cannot register the distributed, infrastructural, and nonhuman dimensions of literacy that this shift makes visible. From this analysis, three design orientations for postdigital literacy environments are derived: making assemblages visible, sustaining fluid literacy spaces, and preserving conditions for critical reflexivity. The article concludes by arguing that these orientations carry political as well as pedagogical stakes, since current AI assemblages risk amplifying existing educational inequalities rather than benefiting all learners equally.
In this paper, we argue that, given L1 education’s focus on language, literature, and communication, a postdigital reflection on Large Language Models (LLMs) can be meaningfully integrated with L1 education. The proliferation of LLMs has impacted education across disciplines, but L1 education is arguably predominantly affected by students using LLMs for reading and writing tasks. A postdigital approach is needed to understand the intertwined nature of digital media and digital technology with current reading and writing practices. This paper considers what secondary school students could learn about LLMs in relation to domain-specific knowledge in L1 secondary education to enable them to make deliberate choices about if and how to use LLMs for reading and writing tasks and to consider the reciprocal relationship between technology and society. We explore what a postdigital perspective on AI literacy would look like in the context of L1 secondary education, by drawing on linguistics and literary studies, two academic disciplines whose insights about LLMs can be meaningfully recontextualized for L1 secondary education. To bring these complementary insights together, we formulated a big idea: LLMs affect how language users assign meaning to text. This big idea could inform a domain-specific exploration of LLMs in relation to the themes of L1 secondary education, focused on considering LLMs beyond mere tools to complement reading and writing tasks.
This paper proposes a framing of literacy not as a skillset or ability but as an orientation towards understanding and being understood by others. We argue that literacy practices are continual efforts to attune to the marks and meanings of those with whom we share a world, mediated by an array of technologies and techniques. Levinas’s concept of the Other is extended into the postdigital to highlight the ethics inherent in literacy practices and to acknowledge the involvement of both human and other-than-human interlocutors in mutual recognition and understanding. This view bridges the divide between descriptive and prescriptive framings of literacy, instead showing that literacy skills are not gained via grammatical rules, but by achieving understanding in relation. We use ethnographic fiction as a method for examining encounters between diverse selves and others via the technologies and techniques of contemporary life and explore themes and tensions that have direct implications for designing for literacy in a postdigital world. Finally, we put forward a heuristic for teaching relational-ethical literacy, inviting learners and educators to examine the ways in which Self-Other relations shape and are shaped by the technologies, techniques, experiences and choices involved in literacy practices.
In this paper, I argue that aesthetic literacy—the cultivated capacity for perceptual transformation through sustained embodied engagement with physical artworks—constitutes a self-formative practice of particular significance for postdigital education. Drawing on Grosz’s ontology of the incorporeal, phenomenological and pragmatist accounts of aesthetic experience (Merleau-Ponty and Dewey), Greene’s account of aesthetic literacy in general education, and Foucault’s technologies of the self, I theorise aesthetic literacy as simultaneously a mode of material-ideal engagement, a cultivation of perceptual and affective capacities, and a practice of freedom. Through it, individuals constitute themselves as subjects capable of sustained attention, vulnerable openness, and ongoing transformation. The museum functions as a more-than-human assemblage in which literate agency emerges through the entanglement of bodies, artworks, gallery architecture, co-visitors, and temporal structures—an assemblage whose conditions can be deliberately designed. I examine what physical presence with artworks specifically affords, analyse how particular configurations of technology foreclose those conditions during primary encounter, and articulate six design principles for cultivating aesthetic literacy in postdigital educational contexts. These principles are organised around a distinction between technologies that mediate initial aesthetic encounter and those that extend learning after it and are constrained throughout by two commitments: that what pedagogy asks of students is the practice rather than its yield and that the material conditions of aesthetic self-formation be democratically distributed. Postdigital scholarship has largely theorised digital and algorithmic competencies, this paper argues that a literacy tied to embodied perception and the material world is prior to them, cultivating the perceiving subject on which any critical reading of images depends—a capacity that does not develop automatically and must therefore be taught.
This article discusses what learning designs should look like to match the complex entanglement of human and non-human actors that characterises the educational realities of today. Drawing on postdigital scholarship, higher education curriculum design literature, and indigenising perspectives from Aotearoa New Zealand, the article suggests a move away from learning designs for literacy development that focus mostly on cognitive changes and the learning of strategies in a disciplinary context. Instead, critical thinking and judgment are foregrounded as key components of literacy, and the article argues that these skills cannot be meaningfully developed without attention to the affective domain in learning designs. To support the development of literacy suited to postdigital realities, the role of the affective domain, for example higher education students’ and educators’ emotions in their encounters with non-human actors, must be recognised. Building on this premise, the article contributes a holistic, ecologically attuned perspective on learning design that integrates affective, relational and material dimensions to support literacy development in more-than-human contexts.
