This article addresses two key challenges that globalization poses to literacy research: the need for new models of literacy and literacy education, and the stakes of adopting multiliteracies pedagogies in different contexts--that is, the tensions between competing hegemonic discourses of collective identity in the public sphere of ethnolinguistic minority societies that are sparked when globalization destabilizes monocultural institutional practices. I explore the stakes of multiliteracies practice within Quebec, an increasingly poly-ethnic white settler society and proto-nation whose minority ethnonational project has been launched on the very terrain of federal multiculturalism within a bilingual framework and provincial interculturalism within a monolingual framework. The article reports on a qualitative study of teacher discourse following collaborative multiliteracies curriculum development in an ethnolinguistically diverse English-language Montreal elementary school. It focuses on the shifting conceptions of multilingual and academic literacies articulated as teachers bring the "lens of the personal" to negotiate competing values and identities implicit in their emerging practice.