Rational

Today’s 21^st Century learners must be educated to be multiliterate in order to interact with others socially and professionally as they feed into the work force. For learners to make meaning of literacy demands, they must first be taught the skills to select and recognise appropriate strategies required to interpret and communicate effectively in global contexts. Kalantzis and Cope (2012) argue that the ‘focus of the authentic pedagogy is on meaning’ (p.209),  the importance of purposeful instructional design towards meaning interpretation by educators cannot be understated as society has greater access than ever to information. 

The challenge to educators while using digital multimodal frameworks, that have similarities to social media platforms, is defining a thinking pattern that captures the freeness of browsing socially, with literate strategies that encourage depth of meaning along the way. 

Many literacy researchers, including Kalantzis and Cope (2012), determine that young learners who are not supported in developing the literate skills required to process texts of the 21st century, share features of oral cultures described by Ong (1982), who states that without the development of ‘orally based thought and expression’, learners are more prone to additive, rather than analytical thinking, leaving them vulnerable to various persuasive forces. Some researchers (eg Macken-Horarik, 1996) have even described this state of vulnerability as being trapped in the 'eternal present'. This description of ‘eternal present’ is ever present socially today as society is ‘fed’ information readily, with no governance except their own acquired skills to interpret meaning effectively.

This webpage has been created to scaffold 10 lessons from a possible 13 lesson unit for a  Year 10 Design Technology Food Specialisations class. Rationalisations will explain the pedagogical choices and design choices evident. 

Syllabus intent and the educator.

Educators are responsible for having a clear understanding of their curriculum's intension. This information is readily available and governed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA, 2019) and each subject has specific content and achievement standards. 

Making the Learning Intensions and Success Criteria evident for each activity and explicitly explaining the curriculum intentions from the Achievement Standards to learners familiarises them with language that will be embedded in their learning. Each of the Teaching Resources requires development of visual literacy as part of purposeful and authentic literacy teaching and learning opportunities. The suggested activities and tasks can be modified as formative or summative assessment, as well as incorporated with learning experiences in themselves. Talk and active response to images form a central role in the tasks. As with assessment of reading and writing, visual literacy assessment should be part of a rich, integrated learning environment (Callow, 2008). Language comprehension plays a central role in mediating learning for constructed meaning (Hammond and Gibbons, 2005) allowing students to experiment with the content and their own thinking about the content, with the ability to make connections across ideas (Hattie, 2009).

Embedding explicit literacy strategies with clear and consistent instructional design within multimodal delivery helps shape learner consciousness, enabling characterising between social browsing of information and inquiring for meaning. Watson and Badenhop (1992) suggests that for literary comprehension to develop,  the interplay between topical and textual knowledge can guide a learner in constructing their own representation, empowering the reader as the meaning maker. This metacognitive development is necessary alongside teaching strategies so that students can recognise when, where and how to use known strategies to further self-regulated meaning (Presseley and Woloshyn,1995).

Unit Design.

The scaffold of the unit of wok reflects syllabus requirements of Design Technologies, creating designed solutions by investigating and defining, designing, producing and implementing, evaluating, and collaborating and managing (ACARA, 2019). The unit requires learners to develop their own narrative towards constraints and identified purposes. Through the Design Process, learners then communicate through activities requiring externalised narrative, sharing understandings about the nature and purpose of the task to make meaningful choices about where to go and what do to next. Learners engage in a variety of literacies: bringing together written, visual, spatial, tactile and oral modes.  Teaching and learning do not simply occur by transferring knowledge and information from one person to another. It “is a collaborative and negotiated social process, whereby knowledge is constructed between, rather than within, individuals” (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 9). Task-specific support through the multimodal platform are evident. They are strategically embedded to help the learner independently to complete the same or similar tasks later in new contexts, this ‘gradual release’ or ‘handover’, allows learners to transfer understandings and skills to new tasks in new learning contexts, thereby becoming increasingly independent (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 8).

Pedagogy strategies.

The the use of different participant structures in the sequence of learning, provides different levels of teacher -student and peer support through the activities. Gibbons (2003) has coined the term message abundancy to refer to the ways in which a number of meaning-making systems are deployed in the teaching and learning of concepts.
This is evident through the different modes of semiotic systems employed to build knowledge around the task concept. For example, through the use of spoken language accompanying action – aural and tactile supports through demonstration and hands-on activities; and the use of physical movement through relevant environments, oral reflection on what was learned, student-written notes paired with collaborative writing, all encouraging student led and student-centred critical thinking. Herke, Lukin, Moore, Wegener, Wu, 2011, (p 192) explain Halliday’s realization of ‘Register’ to context of situations supports the inclusion of various modes of semiotic systems, as each varied element of semiotic structure of the situation activates a corresponding component in the semantic system, allowing for learner total meaning potential, this is known as Halliday’s Model of Register’

The use of this range of semiotic systems and language modes, often simultaneously, meant that students had access to similar messages and information from a variety of sources or, to put it another way, they had more than ‘one bite at the cherry’ as they engaged with new knowledge and concepts (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 17). Allowing learners to make meaning of the literacy demands, to interpret and communicate effectively, transforming understandings. In this view, we are interested not just in the meanings that we find, but also in the work we do with these meanings, which always changes them to some degree. This is a view that puts imagination and creative re-appropriation of the world at the centre of representation and communication, and thus learning.