Transformed Practice in a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Abstract

Global communication is being transformed by new forms of meaning-making in a culturally diverse world. This article concerns these shifts, releasing key findings of a critical ethnography that investigated how a teacher implemented the multiliteracies pedagogy. The study documented a series of media-based lessons with a teacher's culturally and linguistically diverse Year 6 class (students ages 11–12 years). The reporting of this research is timely because teaching multiliteracies is a key feature of Australian educational policy initiatives and syllabus requirements. This article moves the field of literacy research forward by examining the intersection of pedagogy for multimodal textual practices and issues of equity. The important findings concern the differing degrees to which learners utilised the affordances of media for specific cultural purposes through a pedagogy of multiliteracies. Some students reproduced existing designs whereas others applied their knowledge of texts with substantial innovation and creativity. Comparisons are made between the learning demonstrated by students who were of the dominant Anglo-Australian, middle-class culture and by those who were not. Recommendations are given for applying the multiliteracies pedagogy to enable meaningful designing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author gives special acknowledgment to Dr. Annah Healy and Associate Professor William Corcoran, who supervised the PhD thesis from which the data in this article was generated.

Notes

¹This investigation was granted ethical clearance by the University Human Research Ethics Committee at the Queensland University of Technology from May 27, 2003, to January 31, 2006.

²All names in this article have been changed to protect the identities of the research participants.

³Upon reflection, the teacher stated that she saw an improvement in the boys' behaviour during subsequent multimodal projects that were not observed by the researcher.