Elizabeth Petroelje Stolle

Putting Professionalism Back into Teaching: Secondary Preservice and In-Service Teachers Engaging in Interdisciplinary Unit Planning

Recently, interdisciplinary instruction has come back to the educational scene, specifically supported through the Common Core State Standards. As teacher educators and former middle-level teachers, the authors see this as a positive move to enhance learning for adolescents. This qualitative study sought to answer: How do secondary preservice and in-service teachers respond to interdisciplinary instruction? Findings provide key insights into how interdisciplinary instruction, when implemented successfully within a content area literacy course, empowers preservice and in-service teachers, and brings about a more professional environment. That is, data shows designing interdisciplinary instruction provided the teachers space to take up an identity as teaching professional—acting as specialist, acting as agent, and acting as regulator. Based on the authors’ analysis, the authors believe interdisciplinary instruction has the potential to elevate the professional status for teachers, and teacher educators can lead and guide secondary preservice and in-service teachers toward new understandings and paradigms surrounding interdisciplinary methods as we seek to evolve and improve secondary-level curriculum.

Disrupting traditions: Teachers negotiating multiliteracies and digital technologies

Foreword, Theo van Leeuwen & Gunther Kress Preface Chapter One: Introduction to multiliteracies in motion: Current theory and practice, David R. Cole & Darren L. Pullen Part I: Classrooms and multiliteracies in motion Chapter Two: Uncritical framing: Lesson and knowledge structure in school science, Beryl Exley & Allan Luke Chapter Three: Image, voice, and the making of the school-literate child: Lessons from multiliterate teaching in China, Bette Zhang Bin & Peter Freebody Chapter Four: Introducing multimodal literacy to young children learning English as a Second Language (ESL), Len Unsworth & Robyn Bush Part II: Multiliteracies theory in motion Chapter Five: New Media, New Learning, Bill Cope & Mary Kalantzis Chapter Six: Tracking the relationships between technology and users in multiliteracies theory, David R. Cole & Darren L. Pullen Chapter Seven: Multiliteracies and the politics of desire, David R. Cole Part III: The pedagogy of multiliteracies in motion Chapter Eight: Using the Principles of multiliteracies to inform pedagogical change, Michele Anstey & Geoff Bull Chapter Nine: Disrupting traditions: Teachers negotiating multiliteracies and digital technologies, Elizabeth Stolle & Gustavo Fischman Chapter Ten: Using multiliteracies to facilitate culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom, Louanne Smolin & Kimberly Lawless Part IV: Multiliteracies in practice Chapter Eleven: Multiliteracies and assessment practice, Ian Brown, Lori Lockyer & Peter Caputi Chapter Twelve: Young Australians reading in a digital world, Jennifer Rennie & Annette Patterson Chapter Thirteen: Multiliteracies: Resources for meaning-making in the secondary English classroom, Douglas McClenaghan & Brenton Doecke Chapter Fourteen: A virtual school for rethinking learning, Julie Faulkner & Gloria Latham Afterword, Donna E. Alvermann ContributorsThe realities of new technological and social conditions since the 1990s demand a new approach to literacy teaching. Looking onward from the original statement of aims of the multiliteracies movement in 1996, this volume brings together top-quality scholarship and research that has embraced the notion and features new contributions by many of the originators of this approach to literacy. Drawing on large research projects and empirical evidence, the authors explore practical and educational issues that relate to multiliteracies, such as assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. The viewpoint taken is that multiliteracies is a complementary socio-cultural approach to the new literacies that includes pedagogy and learning. The differences are addressed from a multiliteracies perspective – one that does not discount or undermine the new literacies, but shows new ways in which they are complementary. Computers and the Internet are transforming the way we work and communicate and the very notion of literacy itself. This volume offers frontline information and a vital update for those wishing to understand the evolution of multiliteracies and the current state of literacy theory in relation to it.