Summer 2006

Innovation in education

Changing tools changes teaching

Through classroom research Maureen Walsh identifies that the ‘textual shift’ has arrived but ongoing investigation to develop relevant, explicit pedagogy is essential as teachers adapt to this shift in classrooms.

The ‘textual shift’ is here—but how do we adapt to this shift in classrooms? Students of today quickly learn the range of technology that allows them to multitask with a variety of digital media to surf the Internet, send a text message or photo to a friend, play a digital game while listening to music or create their own multimedia texts through such hybrid texts as weblogs. This simultaneous processing and producing of various modes of print, image, movement, graphics, animation, sound and music has been described as ‘multimodality’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Unsworth, 2001). Students’ interaction with multimodal communication is more likely to occur outside school, and there are many reasons why schools cannot be expected to replicate multimedia experiences. However, there are ways in which pedagogy can be redesigned to consider multimodal comm-unication. In a recent and ongoing research study (Walsh, 2006), teachers have been working with a university researcher to redesign literacy pedagogy with multimodal texts and some interesting changes have occurred in their classroom practice.

The overall aim of the research project has been to investigate those aspects of literacy or learning that are evident when students are reading multimodal texts, and how teachers can redesign pedagogy to incorporate multimodal texts with traditional print-based texts within the curriculum. Teachers, in a range of classes from kindergarten to year 8, selected tasks that would easily integrate into their current program. In some cases these were specific English/literacy lessons while in other cases they were part of an integrated program with Science or Human Society and Its Environment (HSIE). Most of the classes had high populations of students from language backgrounds other than English. Teachers developed a rich range of tasks such as WebQuests, comparison of a CD-ROM with a book, construction of visual and digital texts within a Book Rap, construction of webpages, animated advertisements, PowerPoint presentations and iMovies. Many of the tasks involved multiple stages so that students were not engaged in one task or one lesson but a sequence of interrelated activities, or ‘episodes’ that were developed over several days or weeks. The result was that students were highly motivated as they engaged in multidisciplinary and integrated tasks with continuity, variety, collaborative group work and peer learning.

To illustrate the range of innovation that occurred, the tables on the opposite page present summaries of four of the classroom episodes that were developed by teachers. The left-hand column summarises the way the tasks were sequenced through a series of lessons. The right-hand column presents a range of learning that occurred for the students. While data has been analysed for research purposes, the focus here is on demonstrating the teaching and learning processes that took place. They reveal that those teachers used paper and print texts as well as digital texts in creative, integrated ways.

Comments

The classroom episodes are typical of the trends that were occurring in the classroom with multimodal texts. The significance of all the episodes was that multimodal texts were integrated within a program that involved the use of books as well as digital texts, a range of progressive activities to challenge students, and student production of multimodal texts. Literacy was not a separate process, but was embedded within integrated learning tasks. Students were clearly engaged in learning throughout these tasks. There was evidence of problem-solving, reflection, metacognition and creative thinking. The collaborative nature of the tasks fostered peer learning and assisted students’ motivation and engagement in tasks. Learning was relevant and cohesive for students when their work incorporated a range of tasks that required interchange with others in pairs or groups working with or producing texts that combined the modes of speech, print, image, graphics, movement, gesture and sound.

Conclusion

The exemplars presented demonstrate that student literacy and learning can be enhanced through working with multimodal texts in integrated, relevant tasks. However, there are many aspects that need further investigation to assist in developing relevant pedagogy. Further classroom-based research is needed to determine the literacy strategies students need for reading, using and producing multimodal texts. We need ongoing investigation to develop the relevant, explicit pedagogy appropriate for integrating multimodal literacies with conventional literacy practices.

References

Kress, G & Van Leeuwen, T (2001). Multimodal Discourse, Routledge, London.

Unsworth, L (2001). Teaching Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Walsh, M (2006). ‘Literacy and learning with multimodal texts: classroom glimpses’, Synergy, 4 (1), pp. 43–9.

Maureen Walsh is a senior lecturer and assistant head of school in the School of Education (NSW) at ACU National.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au