WRITING AND RESPONDING Dr 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 a purpose – 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 …

MULTIMODAL TEXTS  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

… but we do not want this…!

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 shift Create 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 new conceptualising by identifying and theorising analysing 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

A writer at work Elizabeth Stanley

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

The Deliverance of Dancing Bears: Research- setting, & characters

Jeannie Adams - Pigs and Honey: dummy book The visual and spatial come first with this author – then the linguistic

 agreed purpose established for literacy tasks  students constructed as investigators within a community of learners  experimentation problem-solving is central to activity  students as researchers respond to critically- framed tasks  students design 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 activity that responds to critically framed challenges self regulation teacher regulated self-teacher regulated … literacy learning pathways

Bright ideas Design a theme park Create a game with procedures