Kathy A. Mills

A Review of the “Digital Turn” in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century.

Multiliteracies: interrogating competing discourses

The term ‘multiliteracies’ was coined by the New London Group in 1996 to describe the emergence of new literacies and changing forms of meaning making in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. The proliferation of powerful, multimodal literacies means that previous conceptions of literacy as ‘writing and speech’ are collapsing. Educators and researchers worldwide are rethinking literacy pedagogy to enable students to participate fully in our dynamic, technological and culturally diverse societies. This paper interrogates competing discourses that have arisen in academic literature during the decade since multiliteracies originated. This scholarly debate is timely because multiliteracies are receiving increasing international interest in literacy research, pedagogy and educational policy.

Microblogging as a Literacy Practice for Educational Communities.

Microblogging is an emergent adolescent and adult literacy practice that has become popularized through platforms such as Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku, in the rise of Web 2.0 – “the social web”. Yet the potentials of microblogging for literacy learning in educational contexts is currently underexplored in the research and literature. This article draws on new research with 150 adolescent and adult participants in school and university contexts, which was made possible through cross-disciplinary collaboration between specialists English and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) educators. Strategies are provided for teachers to establish their own microblogging networks, with suggested activities to enhance the literacy learning of adolescents in educational contexts.

iPed: Pedagogy for Digital Text Production

Reading and writing are being transformed by global changes in communication practices using new media technologies. This paper introduces iPed, a research-based pedagogy that enables teachers to navigate innovative digital text production in the literacy classroom. The pedagogy was generated in the context of a longitudinal digital literacy intervention in a school that services low-socioeconomic and ethnically diverse students. iPed synthesizes four key pedagogies that were salient in the analysis of over 180 hours of lesson observations – Link, Challenge, Co-Create, and Share. The strengths of the pedagogy include connecting to students’ home cultures, critical media literacy, collaborative and creative digital text production, and gaining cosmopolitan recognition within global communities.

Access to multiliteracies: A critical ethnography

This paper reports the key findings of a critical ethnography, which documented the enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an Australian elementary school classroom. The multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group is a response to the emergence of multimodal literacies in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Giddens’ structuration theory was applied to the analysis of systems relations. The key finding was that students, who were culturally and linguistically diverse, had differential access to multiliteracies. Existing degrees of access were reproduced among the student cohort, based on the learners’ relation to the dominant culture. Specifically, students from Anglo-Australian, middle-class backgrounds had greater access to transformed designing than those who were culturally or socio-economically marginalized. These experiences were influenced by the agency of individuals who were both enabled and constrained by structures of power within the school and the wider educational and social systems.

We've been wastin' a whole million watchin' her doin' her shoes Situated Practice within a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Communication in society today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning-making in a context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. The need to teach these new literacy practices referred to as multiliteracies, is now embedded within systemic policies in Australia. This research paper is a response to these imperatives, releasing key findings of a critical ethnographic study concerning interactions between pedagogy and access to multiliteracies among culturally and linguistically diverse learners. A salient finding was that situated practice was enacted as an isolated stage rather than occurring concurrently with overt instruction. This had significant connections to some learners’ inability to access new, multimodal, and digitally-mediated designs of meaning. More importantly, culturally and linguistically non-students who were not of the dominant culture were least served by the separation of overt instruction and situated practice. The article concludes with the recommendation that multimodal meaning-making requires an instructional model that involves both practice and instruction.

Time, Space, and Text in the Elementary School Digital Writing Classroom

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

The culture of the Christian school

IN DISCUSSIONS OF educational administration theory, school culture has emerged as a contentious construct characterized by polarized positions. The underlying tensions are between conflicting structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives. These have led to views of Christian school culture and school organization as being either, on the one hand, static, positivist, hierarchical, individualistic and capitalistic or, on the other, dynamic, coherentist, communally interdependent, service oriented and Christ-centered. All schools demonstrate an ethos or organizational culture by default if not by design. It is therefore imperative for Christian school administrators, educators, and the community to consciously define the aspects of school culture that reflect the shared biblical values of the Christian school community.

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 teachers 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.

Transforming the core business of teaching and learning in classrooms through ICT

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become an integral part of societies across the globe. This study demonstrates how successful technology integration by 10 experienced teachers in an Australian high school was dependent on teacher-driven change and innovation that influenced the core business of teaching and learning. The teachers were subject specialists across a range of disciplines, engaging their Year Eight students (aged 12–14 years) in the Technology Rich Classrooms programme. Two classrooms were renovated to accommodate the newly acquired computer hardware. The first classroom adopted a one-to-one desktop model with all the computers with Internet access arranged in a front-facing pattern. The second classroom had computers arranged in small groups. The students also used Blackboard to access learning materials after school hours. Qualitative data were gathered from teachers mainly through structured and unstructured interviews and a range of other approaches to ascertain their perceptions of the new initiative. This investigation showed that ICT was impacting positively on the core business of teaching and learning. Through the support of the school leadership team, the built environment was enabling teachers to use ICT. This influenced their pedagogical approaches and the types of learning activities they designed and implemented. As a consequence, teachers felt that students were motivated and benefited through this experience.