Designing Learning For Multimodal Literacy

Designing Learning for Multimodal Literacy addresses the need to design learning for multimodal literacy in a world that is increasingly saturated with print and digital media. In the current age, communication and interactions on social media are seldom made with language alone but are often accompanied with emojis, images, and videos, making meanings multimodally. Young people, including children, are also increasingly active in making videos of themselves, their ideas, and their experiences as part of their out-of-school literacy activities. In particular, for language teachers, the present shifts in our world require that teachers re-examine what they teach and how they can meaningfully and effectively teach the students in their classes today. At 8 years old, Alden created his own rap music video and shared it with the world. He wrote his own lyrics and set it against the music he remixed and meshed from a music download site. Alden is in your classroom today. As his teacher, what would you teach him? How would you engage him? Alden, and children like him, is the inspiration for why the authors have written this book. The changing times and changing learners place a demand on educators to continually reflect on what and how teachers are teaching their students – to ensure that learning in school remains relevant, relatable, and prepares them for the world of the future. Lim’s book outlines how teachers can design learning for multimodal literacy. It is a result of a collaboration between an educational researcher and a curriculum developer, and offers practical resources for practitioners but also design principles and considerations based on practice with a range of students to inform and inspire academics and postgraduate students. It is poised to contribute to the global conversation and interest on how educators can reflect on the zeitgeist of the digital age and design learning for multimodal literacy.

Teaching and learning involve more than just language. The teachers' use of gestures, the classroom spaces they occupy and the movements they make, as well as the tools they use, work together with language as a multimodal ensemble of meanings. Embodied teaching is about applying the understandings from multimodal communication to the classroom. It is about helping teachers recognise that the moves they make and the tools they use in the classroom are part of their pedagogy and contribute to the design of the students’ learning experience. In response to the changing profile and needs of learners in this digital age, pedagogic shifts are required. A shift is the evolving role of teachers from authority of knowledge to designers of learning. This book discusses how, using examples drawn from case studies, teachers can use corporeal resources and (digital) tools to design learning experiences for their students. It advances the argument that the study of the teachers' use of language, gestures, positioning, and movement in the classroom, from a multimodal perspective, can be productive. This book is intended for educational researchers and teacher practitioners, as well as curriculum specialists and policy makers. The central proposition is that as teachers develop a semiotic awareness of how their use of various meaning-making resources express their unique pedagogy they can use these multimodal resources aptly and fluently to design meaningful learning experiences. This book also presents a case for further research in educational semiotics to understand the embodied ways of meaning-making in the pedagogic context.

This book offers a multimodal perspective on how to design meaningful learning experiences with digital technologies. Digital education is of increasing importance in today’s digital society and the editors bring together international thought-leaders and well-established academics across geographical regions to explore the topic. The book addresses the need to design learning with digital technologies, especially in a post-pandemic environment where blended learning has become ubiquitous. The book is organised around five themes: designing learning, digital learning designs, digital learning with embodied teaching, digital learning interactions, and digital multimodal literacies. The chapters focus on digital technologies as multimodal semiotic resources and the educational implication of each theme is drawn out from illustrative cases across contexts of learning. Essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students, this book offers state-of-the-art thinking on how educators can design new learning experiences for students through the meaningful and effective use of digital technologies.

The concept of 'Multiliteracies' has gained increasing influence since it was coined by the New London Group in 1994. This collection edited by two of the original members of the group brings together a representative range of authors, each of whom has been involved in the application of the pedagogy of Multiliteracies.

Multimodal Literacy challenges dominant ideas around language, learning, and representation. Using a rich variety of examples, it shows the range of representational and communicational modes involved in learning through image, animated movement, writing, speech, gesture, or gaze. The effect of these modes on learning is explored in different sites including formal learning across the curriculum in primary, secondary, and higher education classrooms, as well as learning in the home. The notion of literacy and learning as a primary linguistic accomplishment is questioned in favor of the multimodal character of learning and literacy. By illustrating how a range of modes contributes to the shaping of knowledge and what it means to be a learner, Multimodal Literacy provides a multimodal framework and conceptual tools for a fundamental rethinking of literacy and learning.

With the recent explosion of technology into the world of education across the globe, this book sets out a framework for rethinking the three key areas of schooling that are most affected by technology's impact on education today: knowledge as curriculum; learning and pedagogy and literacy across the curriculum. A well-known author in this field, Jewitt takes the reader through an analysis of teaching and learning with materials such as CD-ROMs, websites, the Internet, computer programming applications and computer games, relating each in turn to the main curriculum topics. Through this detailed scrutiny the following questions emerge: How do the new technologies reshape knowledge as curriculum? How does the use of new technologies in the classroom reshape learning pedagogy? As writing moves from page to screen, what is the impact on students' situated literacy practices and how does it effect learning? Through these questions, this book demonstrates that mode, technology and curriculum knowledge are fundamentally connected and describes how teacher and student roles in the classroom could be altered in the face of new technologies.

Taking a close look at multimodal composing as an essential new literacy in schools, this volume draws from contextualized case studies across educational contexts to provide detailed portraits of teachers and students at work in classrooms. Authors elaborate key issues in transforming classrooms with student multimodal composing, including changes in teachers, teaching, and learning. Six action principles for teaching for embodied learning through multimodal composing are presented and explained. The rich illustrations of practice encourage both discussion of practical challenges and dilemmas and conceptualization beyond the specific cases. Historically, issues in New Literacy Studies, multimodality, new literacies, and multiliteracies have primarily been addressed theoretically, promoting a shift in educators’ thinking about what constitutes literacy teaching and learning in a world no longer bounded by print text only. Such theory is necessary (and beneficial for re-thinking practices). What Multimodal Composing in Classrooms contributes to this scholarship are the voices of teachers and students talking about changing practices in real classrooms.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.