ERIC Number: EJ766614
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006-Dec
Pages: 21
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0311-6999
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
"We've Been Wastin' a Whole Million Watchin' Her Doin' Her Shoes" Situated Practice within a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
Mills, Kathy A.
Australian Educational Researcher, v33 n3 p13-33 Dec 2006
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. (Contains 9 figures and 1 endnote.)
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Ethnography, Literacy, Cultural Pluralism, Global Approach, Context Effect, Scaffolding (Teaching Technique), Assignments, Teacher Student Relationship, Cooperative Learning, Group Dynamics, Educational Strategies, Visual Aids, Scripts, Teacher Expectations of Students, Teacher Guidance
Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). P.O. Box 71, Coldstream, Victoria 3770, Australia. Tel: +61-0359-649-031; Fax: +61-0359-649-586; e-mail: aare@aare.edu.au; Web site: http://www.aare.edu.au/aer/contents.htm
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Middle Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A