Interpretive responses to images in picture books by primary and secondary school students: Exploring curriculum expectations of a ‘visual grammatics’

As well as maintaining the central role of literature, the new Australian Curriculum: English emphasises the multimodal nature of literacy and requires students in primary and secondary schools to develop explicit knowledge about visual and verbal grammar as a resource for text interpretation and text creation. This study investigated the use of visual grammatics in interpreting picture books by students across Years Four, Five, Seven and Ten following an intensive professional learning programme undertaken by their teachers. A proposed framework describes variation in students' interpretive stance from tactical to diegetic to semiotic. Levels of student semiotic understanding are differentiated and differences between students' oral and written interpretations are discussed in relation the need for explicit teaching of written interpretive responses to multimodal literary texts, drawing on an articulated visual and verbal grammatics appropriate to the teaching of English in primary and secondary schools.     

Education and Opportunity: Some Economic Perspectives

Abstract

This paper argues against the current tendency to regard the acquisition of facts and useful skills as primary in education. While this tendency has often been criticised in theory before, it remains prevalent in practice. Moreover, influential theses in philosophy of education are often taken to support such a tendency, and the current political climate appears to be influencing educational policy in that direction. Hence it is worth opposing it again with, it is hoped, some fresh lines of thought.

An outline is sketched of a philosophical position which supports a different kind of approach which the author has seen in practice.

While there is a place in education for factual knowledge and useful skills, they should be recognised as secondary. The primary qualities, it is argued, are the development (a) of moral values and attitudes, and (b) of critical independent thinking in a spirit of creative enquiry.

In practice one sees a more widespread commitment to a Personal Enquiry conception of education, which incorporates the primary qualities, in primary than in secondary schools.     

Cable and New Media

Mary Alice Mayer Phillips' CATV: A History of Community Antenna Television (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972—$9.75)