Investigating children’s interactions around digital texts in classrooms : how are these framed and what counts?

This article argues that, in informing our understanding of the possibilities and challenges associated with new technologies in educational contexts, we need to explore what counts to children when using digital texts in classrooms, and what children think counts for their teachers. It suggests that such insights can be gained by investigating children's interactions around these texts and, drawing on Goffman's work, considering how these are framed. This is illustrated using examples from a study of classroom digital literacy events. The article suggests that it is important to consider how frames disrupt, intersect with and over-layer each other

Material matters for learning in virtual networks : A case study of a professional learning programme hosted in a Google+ online community

Date of Acceptance: 13/07/2015Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Masterclass Pedagogy for Multimedia Applications in Teacher Education

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 (Lemke 1998), hypertextual links (Burbules & Callister, 2000) and information architecture. The design of this unit’s pedagogy of pedagogies is explicated through Christie’s (2002) theorisation of curriculum macrogenre and Bernstein’s (2000) rules of recognition and realization to show how the pre-service teachers moved from being consumers and ‘natives’ of digital environments to become analysts and designers of such environments

Transformed Practice in a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

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