Review of: Pluriversal literacies for sustainable futures: When words are not enough By MiaPerry, Routledge. 2023. Paperback: $68.84

In Pluriversal Literacies for Sustainable Futures, author Mia Perry offers a framework for a literacy education in land, water, matter, body and spirit. The book may be of interest to curriculum scholars and teachers in sustainability education as well as the target audience of teachers and scholars whose work intersects with literacy education, curriculum and policy making. The framework is a tentative yet visionary proposal, presented in the culminating chapter. The book is organized in two parts: Part 1, Chapters 1–5 lays the philosophical groundwork, and Part 2, Chapters 6–11 provides examples for research and practice. The work is a provocative and necessary contribution to re-thinking the relations of literacy to ecological sustainability. However, the framework's intentions may be frustrated by the scope to pluralize so many ways of knowing within the purview of literacy education. This review surveys the contents of Part 1 and two and their applicability for research and teaching. When land changes and water systems differ, when climate and animal life is different and geology shifts, then the human relations with those environments need to be supported to be literate in those contexts. (Perry, 2023, p. 32). In opposition to situated literacies are neocolonial notions of literacy. Chapters 3 to 5 untangle the dominance of a universal literacy education woven into global economic development policies promoted by the United Nations since World War II. While the historical analysis and arguments presented here are not new, Perry tells the story in a way many literacy scholars will find helpful, particularly in their teaching at the postgraduate/graduate level. Chapter 3, for instance, provides a compelling overview of the history of literacy policy development and its entanglements with systems for international development and accountability metrics: ‘We find ourselves in a world in which the most vulnerable and marginalized are now subject to the narrowest and most conversative versions of literacy policy’ (p. 42). Perry further suggests improvements in population literacy scores are tied to hyper-consumption and carbon dependency. Although this statement gives reason for pause, as association does not affirm causation, this chapter serves as an introduction to what needs to be de-colonized in literacy curricula and policy. We have appreciated sign systems beyond language. We have acknowledged the interplay of these systems. But in educational practice and discourse, multiliteracies remain solidly in the human and socio-cultural domain. An extension of this work in the natural world, the visual, gestural, and aural signs beyond the human are yet to be given adequate attention. (p. 86) This is intended to serve as a call to explore, research and teach literacies for living with/in sustainable environments. Chapters 7 to 10 provide tentative examples of this effort, leading to a pluriversal literacies framework for teaching land, water, body, matter and spirit literacies. But who else is doing the work of understanding and teaching these more than human sign systems? Perry frequently references ecologists in her text and relies heavily on Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's work. She also recounts examples of colleagues practising various forms of faith to make a case for bringing values into literacy education that engage with relational ways of sustaining livable worlds. It is clear we have much to learn. In Wall Kimmerer's words, ‘to be native to a place we must learn to speak its language’ (2013, p. 48, cited in Perry, p. 32). Perry rubs her fingers in soil and dips her toes in water, literally and figuratively, to begin reading the unspoken, unwritten signs of her own place. However, it seems overly ambitious to conceive that literacy education should encompass ecological education or land-based Indigenous pedagogy or spiritual formation. As Pluriversal Literacies illustrates, when we have reached the point of what feels like the end of something, possibilities reveal themselves when we begin to explore our illiteracies. A strength of this book is its call to humility and learning. So, what can language and literacy educators do? They can humbly lend their ways of knowing about the relations of language to culture, the affordances of multiple modes of communication and an understanding of how literacies are developed as sociomaterial practices to the efforts of others with knowledge of what it means to live sustainably. Perry cites the Common Worlds Research Collective (2020) as one example of a sustainability-focused education. Perhaps the pedagogy is what we most need to emulate—there is a curriculum framework there already, of beginning in early childhood to explore where/with/whom we are. As learners move from early childhood into elementary and secondary education, science curricula encompass ecological education and increasingly this includes sustainability, thanks in no small part to the United Nation's sustainable development goals. And in colonial contexts, curriculum makers are now often required to integrate Indigenous knowledge and pedagogies across subject areas (see, e.g., the Canadian province of Ontario's language curriculum in Ontario, 2023). Perhaps this serves as a call to other countries to begin or continue to re-value their own land-based literacies, as the example of farming in Ireland illustrates in Chapter 8. But while we still have worlds in common, nothing can be done towards a common good without a plurality of human languages and literacies to communicate. That is and must be the goal of a language curriculum.

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