Masterclass Pedagogy for Multimedia Applications in Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper describes an elective unit in the application of new technologies for pre‐service teachers which employed a metaphor of masterclasses in its design to engage the students in value‐added interactions around their individual multimedia projects. A masterclass involves the class group auditing an individual’s detailed consultation with a “master” on work in progress. In this way, general points are demonstrated and iteratively developed through worked examples. By sharing a range of projects, the class group developed explicit understandings of pedagogical design based around the concepts of metaphor, productive redundancy, hypertextual links, and information architecture. The design of this unit’s pedagogy of pedagogies is explicated through Christie’s theorisation of curriculum macrogenre and Bernstein’s rules of recognition and realisation to show how the pre‐service teachers moved from being consumers and “natives” of digital environments to become analysts and designers of such environments.