Showing papers by "Mary Kalantzis published in 2010"

The Teacher as Designer: pedagogy in the new media age

Abstract: This article outlines a learning intervention which the authors call Learning by Design. The goal of this intervention is classroom and curriculum transformation, and the professional learning of teachers. The experiment involves the practical application of the learning theory to everyday classroom practice. Its ideas are grounded in pedagogical principles originally articulated in the Multiliteracies project, an approach to teaching and learning that addresses literacy and learning in the context of new media and the globalizing knowledge economy. The need for a new approach to learning arises from a complex range of factors - among them, changes in society and the economy; the potential for new forms of communication made possible by emerging technologies; and rising expectations amongst learners that education will maximize their potential for personal fulfillment, civic participation and access to work. The authors first brought together the Learning by Design team of researchers and teachers in 2003 in order to reflect upon and create new and dynamic learning environments. A series of research and development activities were embarked upon in Australia and, more recently, in the United States, exploring the potentials of new pedagogical approaches, assisted by digital technologies, to transform today's learning environments and create learning for the future - learning environments which could be more relevant to a changing world, more effective in meeting community expectations and which manage educational resources more efficiently. One of the key challenges was to create learning environments which engaged the sensibilities of learners who are increasingly immersed in digital and global lifestyles - from the entertainment sources they choose to the way they work and learn. It was also about enabling teachers to explicitly track and be aware of the relationship between their pedagogical choices and their students' learning outcomes. Background: the social conditions for the emergence of a transformative paradigm of learning A revolution is occurring in education. This revolution is being fuelled in part by the new information and communication technologies. Fundamentally, however, the change is in the human relations of learning. The reference point for the changes we will describe in this article is the traditional classroom. This classroom was essentially a communications technology, a room large enough for a teacher to talk to 20, 30, even 40 learners at once. Its classical oral communications modes were the teacher exposition, question and answer involving one learner at a time and whole-class recitation in unison. For most of the time, an individual learner had to sit in silence. The primary written communications medium in this classroom was the textbook (closely following the state-directed syllabus). The learners produced their work (a piece of writing, a test) for an audience of one - the assessing teacher. The main official trace of the student's work was a recorded score. The teacher was pivotal in the predominant communication patterns of the traditional classroom, orchestrating classroom talk, directing students to the textbook and marking their work or their tests. Lateral peer-to-peer communication was, for the most part, practically

A multiliteracies perspective on the new literacies

Abstract: The new communications environment of the 21st century offers unprecedented opportunities for multimodal meaning making, a transformed dynamics of social agency and divergence of discourses. Multi-literacies theory presents a set of educationally useable conceptual schemas and suggestions for an expanded repertoire of literacy practices as a response to these opportunities (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000a). The following discusses the theory and case study of a collaborative application if a set of schemas to address contemporary issues in multiliteracies pedagogy (Cloonan, 2008a).

Ubiquitous learning: An agenda for educational transformation

Abstract: Ubiquitous learning is a new educational paradigm made possible in part by the affordances of digital media. This paper sets out to explore the dimensions of this proposition. We can use new technologies to do learn old things in old ways, but the learner’s relationship to knowledge and the processes of pedagogy have not changed in any significant way. The emergence of ubiquitous computing creates new conditions for all working as education professionals and learning as students. The key is not the logic or technical specifications of the machines. Rather it is the new ways in which meaning is created, stored, delivered and accessed. In this paper, we suggest seven moves which are characteristic of ubiquitous learning. Each explores and exploits the potentials of ubiquitous computing. None, however, is a pedagogical thought or social agenda that is new to the era of ubiquitous computing. The only difference today is that there is now no practical reason not to make each of these moves. The affordances are there, and if we can, perhaps we should. And when we do, we may discover that a new educational paradigm begins to emerge. And as new paradigms emerge, we might find they take a leading role on technological innovation.

From Gutenberg to the Internet: How Digitisation Transforms Culture and Knowledge

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the changes wrought by digitisation upon the domains of culture and knowledge. Half a century into the process of the digitisation of text, we argue that only now are we on the cusp of a series of paradigm shifts in the processes of writing, and concomitantly, our modes of cultural expression and our social processes of knowing. We describe the transition underway in the fundamental mechanics of rendering, the new navigational order which is associated with this transition, the demise of isolated written text that accompanies the rise of multimodality, the ubiquity of recording and documentation, a shift in the balance of representation agency, and its correlate in the emergence of a new dynamics of difference. The shape of these hugely significant changes is just beginning to become clear in the new, internet-mediated social media. The potential of the new textual regime is to transform our very means of production of meaning. However, when we come to examine the domain of formal knowledge production, historically pivoting on the peer reviewed journal and published monograph, there are as yet few signs of change. This paper points in a tentative way to potentials for knowledge-making which are as yet unrealised: new semantic markup processes which will improve knowledge discovery, data mining and machine translation; a new navigational order in which knowledge is not simply presented in a linear textual exegesis; the multimodal representation of knowledge in which knowledge evaluators and validators gain a broader, deeper and less mediated view of the knowledge they are assessing; navigable databanks in which reviewers and readers alike can make what they will of data and interactions recorded incidental to knowledge making; co-construction of knowledge through recursive dialogue between knowledge creators and knowledge users, to the extent of eliding that distinction; and a polylingual, polysemic knowledge world in which source natural language is arbitrary and narrowly specialised discourses and bodies of knowledge can be valued by their intellectual quality instead of the quantitative mass of their readership and citation.

Schemas for meaning-making and multimodal texts

Abstract: It has become commonplace to observe that communication in the 21st century is no longer limited to print-based forms of literacy. The digital world’s reduction of the elementary modular unit for the production of textual meaning from the character of the printing press to the zeros and ones that underlie computer code has resulted in the ability to make, store and distribute sound, language and still and moving images through the same media because they can all be reduced to a common platform. Far from the analog world, the proliferation of new communications technologies has shifted the capacity for combining representational modes from technical specialists to households, classrooms, cafes and libraries. Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal – in which linguistic modes of meaning interface with visual, audio, gestural and spatial patterns of meaning (New London Group, 1996, 2000). Observations on the unprecedented transformations in communication due to the pace of change have also become commonplace. To take one measure, the scale of Internet access has reached a point where one-sixth of the world’s population has access to the Internet with one-half of the world’s population due to be online by 2012. These figures belie divisions among regions, countries and agegroups. However, speed and scale of growth in Internet access in regions with the lowest current access rates, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, are clearly apparent (Internet World Stats, 2006). A profound shift is also occurring in the balance of agency as workers, citizens and learners are increasingly required to be users, players, creators and discerning consumers rather than the audiences, delegates or quiescent consumers of an earlier modernity. Students increasingly spend time in their out-of-school lives using multimodal forms of communication and social networking tools in online worlds, transforming their expectations of and orientations toward texts, literacies and pedagogies. Against this backdrop, state and national curriculum guidelines increasingly embed the need for teachers to attend to digital forms of literacy enabled by contemporary media technologies, and to teach an extended repertoire of new and traditional literacies. But while teachers are encouraged to incorporate multimodal texts and literacies into the classroom, professional learning andother resources are confined to knowledge about technology and its practical uses rather than knowledge of the meaning-making capacities of various modes. Various contributions have been made to the development of theoretical accounts of aspects of multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; New London Group, 2000; Unsworth, 2001). These accounts of multimodal meaning, while widely acknowledged, were not generated out of classroom practice. The core concepts and language in these accounts for the most part remain highly theoretical, and have not been widely explicated for teachers and students. The development of an accessible and generative multimodal metalanguage, a means by which students and teachers can articulate the functions of components of multimodal designs, has been identified as an urgent agenda item in developing students’ multiliteracies capacities (New London Group, 1996, 2000; Unsworth, 2001). This chapter explores a case study of expanded literacy pedagogies in which multimodal meaning-making is incorporated. In this case, the stimulus for renewed literacy teaching was a professional learning research project (Cloonan, 2005, 2008a, 2008b) involving early-years literacy teachers (students aged 5-10). This chapter will outline the context of the professional learning research, including two key schemas drawn from multiliteracies theory with which participating teachers engaged – a multimodal schema and a pedagogical knowledge-processes schema. Following this, it will detail the classroom literacy pedagogical context in which multimodal texts were encountered and created by students. Teacher attention to different modes of meaning (linguistic, visual, gestural, audio and spatial) as a result of engagement with multiliteracies schemas will be analyzed. A dimensions-of-meaning schema will support this analysis. Further possibilities for teacher generation of a multimodal metalanguage using the dimensions-ofmeaning schema will be explored.