Railways,rebellions and Rage Against The Machine: adolescents' interests and meaning‐making in the creation of multimodal identity texts

This paper draws on a Canadian qualitative case study grounded in multiliteracies theory to describe the meaning‐making processes of four students aged 13‐14 years as they created history projects. Students were invited to explore curriculum content in self‐chosen ways and to produce presentations in a range of formats. The data we present and discuss were collected through participant observation and in‐situ interviews with four students who selected digital formats. We examine these data using multiliteracies concepts: specifically multimodality and identity texts. We argue that multimodal literacy practices have potential to bridge gaps between students' in‐school and out‐of‐school lives and underscore the importance of allowing students to draw on their out‐of‐school identities and interests to guide explorations of curriculum content.     

Empowering English as an Additional Language students through digital multimodal composing

While digital multimodal composing, underpinned by a critical literacies approach, provides opportunities for students to make informed semiotic choices and voice concerns about social issues, there is limited research exploring how digital multimodal composing is employed to interrogate and challenge the entanglements of language, immigration status and power. This article explores how 23 primary-aged English as an Additional Language (EAL) students (Years 3–6) engaged in digital multimodal composing, in the context of an after-school multiliteracies programme in one Australian school. Conceptualising critical literacies as a bridge to access and transform codes of power, the article explores how the participating students selected and used different semiotic resources for their digital texts while challenging and redefining dominant discourses based on their lived experiences and interests. The study found that both students and pre-service teachers found value in students having access to digital technologies and experimenting with a range of multimodal and multilingual resources to create digital texts, which reflected cultural and linguistic identities. The findings illustrate how the creation of digital multimodal and multilingual texts allows for opportunities for students to reposition themselves as knowledgeable and active meaning-makers with strategic support from teachers and peers.     

Talking and Teaching Through a Positional Lens: Recognizing what and who we privilege in our practice

This article describes a year‐long professional development project that brought together a group of high school English teachers around multicultural literature they would be teaching to their students. The teachers all taught together in a culturally and economically diverse high school context in the USA. One objective of the project was to enable the teacher participants to explore their discourse patterns around the literature to discern their own subject positions with regard to one another and to the texts studied. In addition, the teachers together analyzed their own classroom discourse to determine how those subject positions carried over into their teaching, how they essentially taught who they were. Discussions of multicultural literature and teachers’ talk around that literature, accompanied by close interrogation of classroom practice, enabled the teachers to discern what (and who) they privileged in their teaching practice. These realizations led one of the two teachers highlighted to readily change her pedagogy and curriculum to better support the learning and empowerment of all students.     

Exploring practices of multiliteracies pedagogy through digital technologies: a narrative inquiry

Digital technologies have fast become integral within literacy learning and teaching across contexts as students engage with a variety of digital and multimodal texts. While teachers in New Zealand schools have a high degree of autonomy in the design and planning of literacy programs, little is currently known about how they understand and enact multiliteracies pedagogy (MLP). Using data gathered via interviews and classroom observations in an intermediate school in New Zealand, this article adopts a narrative inquiry approach to explore one teacher's approaches to using digital technologies and texts within literacy instruction. We explore in particular the ways in which MLP may be enacted implicitly rather than explicitly, within the complex matrix of teachers' personal beliefs and learning experiences, the perceived learning needs of students, and the school curriculum. We conclude with a call for the conscious and purposeful teaching of MLP, focusing on synaesthesia and the semiotic functions of texts.     

Developing multiliteracies in a technology-mediated environment

Evolving technologies and globalisation presents educators with the challenge of creating learning experiences to help students develop competencies to enable them to function successfully in a dynamic society. Today’s learner is expected to be multiliterate – able to analyse and construct multi-modal texts. A qualitative embedded multi-case study was conducted to investigate the learning experiences and multiliteracy outcomes for students engaged in an educational program with a media studies focus. The program, designed for a secondary school English curriculum, was underpinned by multiliteracies pedagogy and delivered within a technology-mediated environment. This paper reports a single class case drawing upon examples from small group cases embedded within the class. The findings suggest that educational programs underpinned by multiliteracy pedagogy supported by technology can provide meaningful learning experiences for students whilst achieving multiliteracies focused learning outcomes. For this to occur important factors such as teacher technology competencies and expertise, access and integration of technology and facilitation of effective learning scaffolds should be considered.     

Listening to learning outside the classroom: student teachers study playground literacies

This article reports on ongoing work in initial teacher education (ITE) where student teachers have been required to observe and record children's play, to describe and analyse this, and to consider the pedagogical implications. They have been introduced to a theoretical background, which takes into account the increasingly multi‐modal nature of literacy practices, and have been shown a methodology for conducting a small‐scale ethnographic research project on the playground. They have been encouraged to consider how the unofficial literacy practices of the children's homes, communities and popular culture might affect the official practices of the school, and to understand how children absorb and recreate texts from beyond the school curriculum. The article reflects the student teachers' findings on school playgrounds, with narratives re‐enacted and drawn from popular media, imaginative use of playground space, and games that explore the pupils' present and future lives. Student teachers begin to recognise the vital role of socio‐dramatic play in the development of emergent literacy. They also develop insights on applying children's expertise outside the classroom to their literacy practices within the school.     

Contemporary Models of Communicative Practice: Shaky Foundations in the Foundation Stage?

This article outlines a four‐year‐old child's multi‐modal encounters with texts and analyses one of those encounters in the light of a framework for the analysis of such events. It is argued that this analysis leads to the conclusion that the experiences with texts that permeate young children's lives are complex in nature and that this complexity is not sufficiently addressed in relevant curriculum frameworks. Further, it is suggested that young children's encounters with televisual texts need to be identified as emergent techno‐literacy practices which should be supported and extended in ways which correlate to the strategies used with regard to print‐based texts.     

Negotiating multiple identities between school and the outside world: a critical discourse analysis

This article examines interview talk of three students in an Australian high school to show how they negotiate their young adult identities between school and the outside world. It draws on Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to argue that identities are linguistically and corporeally constituted. A critical discourse analysis of segments of transcribed interviews and student-related public documents finds a mismatch between a social justice curriculum at school and its transfer into students' accounts of outside school lived realities. The article concludes that a productive social justice pedagogy must use its key principles of (con)textual interrogation to engage students in reflexive practice about their positioning within and against discourses of social justice in their student and civic lives. An impending national curriculum must decide whether or not it negotiates the discursive divide any better.     

Orchestrating debate: a multimodal analysis of classroom interaction

This paper examines the ways in which the interpretation of a literary text is constructed through social interaction in a multi‐ethnic urban secondary school English classroom. The focus is on the literacy experiences of Year 10 students (age 14 to 15 years). We take a multimodal approach to understanding social interaction around texts and show that higher‐order literacy skills are realised and constructed through the configuration of talk and writing with a range of other representational and communicational modes, such as gesture, gaze, movement, and posture. We suggest that despite the exhaustive regulation of literacy and school English, some English teachers, while still curriculum and examination focused, have found strategies that give them space to make connections between texts and the experiences of their particular student intake. They do so in ways that link to wider social and moral issues, drawing on their own and their students' life experiences, to make cultural connections with the texts studied. The paper shows how a multimodal analysis of social interaction facilitates and extends understanding of the teaching that is taking place.     

A forest‐based environment as a site of literacy and meaning making for kindergarten children

This study analyses the valued school experiences of 15 five‐ and six‐year‐old Canadian children, through their creation of multimodal texts. Throughout the school year, the students spent a large portion of each school day in the expansive forest on the school grounds, and their texts revealed their significant interest in this natural outdoor environment. Specifically, the data revealed that the outdoor space provided a context where the children could engage with each other and the environment in meaningful, creative and collaborative ways. This research has the potential to contribute to our understanding of the capacity of young children to share their thoughts on their school experiences by drawing on a range of modes and to contribute to our understanding of the power of alternative learning spaces, such as forest environments, on children's literacy learning and development.     

“…If we were cavemen we'd be fine”: Facebook as a catalyst for critical literacy learning by dyslexic sixth‐form students

This article is derived from a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a sixth form college in north‐west England. Through a project in which teacher‐researcher and student‐participants co‐constructed a group Facebook page about the students’ scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examined the educational affordances of a digitally mediated social network. An innovative, flexible, experiential methodology combining action research and case study with an ethnographic approach was devised. This enabled the use of multiple mixed methods, capturing much of the rich complexity of the students’ online and offline interactions with each other and with digital media as they contributed to the group and co‐constructed their group Facebook page. Social perspectives on dyslexia and multiliteracies were used to help interpret the students’ engagement with the social network and thereby deduce its educational potential. The research concludes that as a digitally mediated social network, Facebook engages the students in active, critical learning about and through literacies in a rich and complex semiotic domain. Offline dialogue plays a crucial role. This learning is reciprocally shaped by the students’ developing identities as both dyslexic students and able learners. The findings suggest that social media can have advantageous applications for literacy learning in the classroom. In prompting learning yet remaining unchanged by it, Facebook can be likened to a catalyst.     

‘GetReel’: engaging Year 6 students in planning,scripting, actualising and evaluating media text

The notion of ‘multiliteracies’ and the development and creation of multimodal texts within classrooms is of pedagogic interest in this age of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The case study reported herein provides an analysis of how one teacher engaged her class of primary school students as they responded to the challenge of creating and filming a 30‐second television commercial on a social justice issue. The media texts were constructed in a 10‐week period. The paper describes the process as the teacher and these students planned, wrote, filmed and edited their commercials. It offers an example of how the changing nature of literacy and, specifically, text, is enacted in the classroom.     

Creativity as capital in the literacy classroom: youth as multimodal designers

Many school literacy practices ignore adolescents' new digitally mediated subjectivity as it has been shaped by the new media age. Youth possess often unappreciated repertories of practice which allow them to use their imagination and creativity to combine print, visual and digital modes in combinations that can be applied to new educational, civic, media and workplace contexts. This paper reports on research in two middle years classrooms in New York City's Chinatown, where students' design skills were recognised and validated when they were encouraged to critically re‐represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design. The curriculum, rather than privileging print‐only representations, recognised the linguistic, social, economic and cultural capital that different students brought to school. The findings suggest schools should harness youths' creativity – that often manifests itself through their capital resources – as they integrate and adapt to the new digital affordances acquired through their out‐of‐school literacy practices.     

职业教育课程的学科话语与实践话语

20世纪90年代以来,我国职业教育课程的学科话语与实践话语的争论经历了从“数量”到“逻辑”两个阶段。尽管在学术领域实践话语占据了主导,在实践领域却是学科话语占据着主体。目前,我国职业教育课程正处于从传统的以学科课程为主体的课程模式,转向以项目课程或任务引领型课程为主体的课程模式阶段。职业教育课程从学科话语到实践话语的转换,实际上意味着思考课程问题的思维方式的转换。职业教育课程设计应当充分考虑学生的学习特点,打破从理论到实践的机械课程设计思路,转向让学生在工作实践的基础上,通过自我反思来建构理论知识。     

School Art Education: Mourning the Past and Opening a Future

This article begins with a brief summary of the findings of a recent research project that surveyed the content of the art curriculum in a selection of English secondary schools. The research findings suggest a particular construction of pedagogised subjects and objects rooted in ideas of technical ability and skill underpinned by a transmission model of teaching and learning. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and social theory reasons for passionate attachments to such curriculum identities are proposed, when in the wider world of art practice such identities were abandoned long ago. Working with the notion of the subordination of teaching to learning and the difficulties of initiating curriculum practices within increasingly complex social contexts, the article argues for learning through art to be viewed as a productive practice of meaning‐making within the life‐worlds of students. The term, ‘encounters of learning’ is employed to sketch a pedagogical quest in which an ethics of learning remains faithful to the truth of the learning event for the student.     

What digital games and literacy have in common: a heuristic for understanding pupils' gaming literacy

This article argues that digital games and school‐based literacy practices have much more in common than is reported in the research literature. We describe the role digital game paratexts – ancillary print and multimodal texts about digital games – can play in connecting pupils’ gaming literacy practices to ‘traditional’ school‐based literacies still needed for academic success. By including the reading, writing and design of digital game paratexts in the literacy curriculum, teachers can actively and legitimately include digital games in their literacy instruction. To help teachers understand pupils’ gaming literacy practices in relation to other forms of literacy practices, we present a heuristic for understanding gaming (HUG) literacy. We argue our heuristic can be used for effective teacher professional development because it assists teachers in identifying the elements of gameplay that would be appropriate for the demands of the literacy curriculum. The heuristic traces gaming literacy across the quadrants of actions, designs, situations and systems to provide teachers and practitioners with a knowledge of gameplay and a metalanguage for talking about digital games. We argue this knowledge will assist them in capitalising on pupils’ existing gaming literacy by connecting their out‐of‐school gaming literacy practices to the literacy and English curriculum.     

Changing Literacies and Civic Pathways: Multiliteracies in Inquiry-Driven Classrooms

Reflecting on how “the very nature of language learning has changed”(New London Group [NLG], 1996, p. 64), this article describes an inquiry-driven teaching approach to middle school English. Looking at student outcomes utilizing Google’s 20% approach, this study explored how mentorship, digital tools, and student interests provide “opportunities [for students] to find their own voices” (NLG, 1996, p. 71). In particular, this article analyzes student inquiry based on the 4 pedagogical foundations of multiliteracies: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. By focusing on the voices and experiences of students, this framework highlights what multiliteracies can look like within classrooms. Ultimately, this study of literacies within inquiry-driven classrooms responds to the call of multiliteracies research from 20 years ago that, “Students need to develop the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (New London Group, 1996, p. 67).     

Learning to Be: The Modelling of Art and Design Practice in University Art and Design Teaching

Learning to be an artist or designer is a complex process of becoming. Much of the early phase of ‘learning to be’ occurs during the time emerging artists and designers are students in university art/design programmes, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Recent research reveals that a critical role in assisting students in their maturing identities as artists and designers is played by artist/designer‐academics teaching in university art and design programmes. By maintaining active art/design practices and drawing from these in their teaching, artist/designer‐academics model professional practice to students. Witnessing and interacting with such modelling is part of the process of students learning the shared discourses, views and practices of the art or design worlds to which they aspire to belong. The modelling of professional practice is critical to an artist or designer's ‘learning to be’ experience because it enables students to access the tacit and nuanced behaviours, languages and cultures that constitute contemporary art or design practice. This article outlines findings from a recent Australian study revealing the role of professional practice modelling in university art/design teaching. It highlights the centrality of professional practice modelling to artist/designer‐academics in their beliefs and approaches to teaching their academic disciplines. In critically exploring the research data and findings this article describes the role that modelling of practice plays and how it comprises a core part of the value that artist/designer‐academic participants contribute to the teaching of art/design education.