WRITING AND RESPONDINGDr Annah Healy
Presentation – Adelaide 2008
Satisfying stakeholders!
What have we learnt?
Where are we at?
Skills focus: Necessary as it… contributes to code-breaking, meaning-
making process identifies specific codes, conventions and
concepts about texts identifies skills that are essential for
understanding genres, their purposes and audiences
Skills are more effectively learned in contexts for which the writer sees purpose
Why do people write using *exclusively, the linguistic component of text?
narrative personal notes (restricted messages) Segment within …Purposes disappear by the decade, but the
assiduous focused teaching of grammars, structures and conventions remain – to integrate with other design features, writers must know how written language operates
Skills focus is insufficient as it… does not address multimodal and hybrid texts focuses on mechanics only, rather than on
literacy as a social, cultural and cognitive practice
fails to recognise diverse backgrounds, experiences, knowledges, values of students
does not emphasise the combining and recombining of skills in different ways and in different contexts for different purposes
Critiques of the traditional model of writing process
teaching targeted identical products from students
the model favoured particular social groups and almost always girls
reinforced a copyist model as opposed to innovative ones
taught students dependency on single structures
… and up popped the Genre Approach
modeling explicit information about genre (students copied the exemplar model)
provided opportunity to jointly construct genre
with mastery, students learned to approximate genre but not integrate the linguistic components with other design elements
Text constitution
One example ………..
How does the text go beyond skill and traditional genre teaching?
Rationale for thinking differently about text construction
A multiliteracies approach to develop student knowledge and capacities across literacies that constitute today’s communications, has much potential
Through longer term-projects, the multiliteracies pedagogical model offers real-life cross-curricula experience for diverse groups of students
A Text Design focus: How does this help?
1. information is exchanged through a range of media, modes and technologies – students should gain wide experience in reading and constructing single and multimodal texts
2. texts are designed to target an audience and apurpose – understanding communication as power is crucial for decision-making about how the text is to be produced
3. texts are designed in relation to information – selecting media and mode to effect the desired end takes substantive, scaffolded practice
4. digital texts interrelate a number of design elements (multimodality) – five design features …
MULTIMODALTEXTS
Integrated
meaning-making systems
linguistic [oral and written]
audio [sound effects]
spatial [visual relationships between image/marks on a surface]
gestural [meaningful signs]
visual [non-linguistic information]
Text Design Features
What must be learned in addition to conventional linguistic knowledge?
multimodality code knowledge and selection visual and spatial relations and text power visual and verbal vocabularies that target
text’s audience grammars of visual-verbal design
Pedagogy must be tied to a student’s sense of belonging
Belonging relies on engagement of learner identities [capacities, social and cultural], knowledge, experiences, interests and motivations
Q: What engages students who may be, for different reasons, marginalised? This group includes some adolescents, the gifted and talented, ‘at risk’ students, those with discontinuous schooling, second language learners, students with social and medical disorders.
Q: What engages the highly motivated and capable student?
Starting with learners …..Pedagogy and learner diversity
Pedagogic shiftCreate communities of practice where teacher and students are both expert and learners
Teach the diversity of communications – modes of meaning for different social, cultural, *professional and community contexts
Plan a multiliteracies longer-term project
Critically frame all activity – audience? purpose? who says? who is affected? challenge knowledge/accepted wisdoms?
… contd.
Students and teacher constitute a community of learners. Teacher creates contexts for students to engage with knowledge processes:
experiencing the known and newconceptualising by identifying and theorisinganalysing functionally and critically applying appropriately and creatively
… and do so through critical, problem-based enquiry strategies with experiential, disciplinary, critical and capability considerations
The learning journey has two axes:
Depth axis - learning what’s not immediately or intuitively obvious from the perspective of everyday lived experience (PP – deep knowledge + critical framing).
Activity must challenge everyday assumptions:• what you read/encounter is not always accurate/credible• texts are influential and require analysis• ‘the desirable’ may be inflicted on us• any text supplies only one lens on knowing
Breadth axis – a pathway to unfamiliar places - in the mind and in reality.
…but … the unfamiliar must be in acceptable measures!
…Failure occurs when the distance between the life-world of the student and the text targets are too great (learning compromised), or when there is no distance between the two (learning diminished)
Transformed practice occurs when there is:
1. mastery over design repertoire selections
2. substantive content knowledge
3. a specific audience is targeted
4. text purpose is identified
5. learner has reached greater independence as a critical reader and text constructor
Multiliteracies projects draw from real-life social practices with text that students recognise
engage student learning over longer periods
embed new basics knowledge and capacities
engage different learners on different learning paths
respect diversity among students
target multimodal *design repertoires
The Deliverance of Dancing Bears: Research- quotes & titles
Organisational elements have a logic: accents and spatial consideration for later ease of access - later reference
The Deliverance of Dancing Bears: Drafts
Spatiality begins with understanding conventions: responds to –climax building, pause, cause and effect, the ‘page’
The Deliverance of Dancing Bears: Research- setting, & characters
The design process begins… an integration of 5 design elements
Spatiality concerns effect! foreground, background, accent and position, the white space
Jeannie Adams -Pigs and Honey: dummy book
The visual and spatial come first with this author – then the linguistic
agreed purposeestablished
forliteracy tasks
studentsconstructed asinvestigators
within acommunity of
learners
experimentation problem-solving
is central toactivity
students asresearchers
respondto
critically-framed tasks
studentsdesign texts
over a substantive
learning period
Pedagogic orientation
independent literacy experience that draws from the learner’s life-world
overt activity that provides new/deeper literacy- related knowledge
guided activitythat responds to critically
framed challenges
selfregulation
teacherregulated
self-teacherregulated
… literacy learning pathways