Multimodal approaches to reflective teaching and assessment in higher education

Reflection is not a new concept in the teaching of higher education and is often an important component of many disciplinary courses. Despite this, past research shows that whilst there are examples of rich reflective strategies used in some areas of higher education, most approaches to and conceptualisations of reflective learning and assessment have been perfunctory and inconsistent. In many disciplinary areas reflection is often assessed as a written activity ‘tagged onto’ assessment practices. In creative disciplines however, reflective practice is an integral and cumulative form of learning and is often expressed in ways other than in the written form. This paper will present three case studies of reflective practice in the area of Creative Industries in higher education – Dance, Fashion and Music. It will discuss the ways in which higher education teachers and students use multi-modal approaches to expressing knowledge and reflective practice in context. The paper will argue that unless students are encouraged to participate in deep reflective disciplinary discourse via multi-modes then reflection will remain superficial in the higher education context.

Networked reading : using AustLit to assist reading and understanding of texts from the past

In response to a focus on reading, this paper examines the notion of reading online; as such it uses the term ‘networked reading’ to describe any act of reading in an online or digital environment. In accordance with this notion of ‘networked’ reading, the paper provides a broad introduction to AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource. This is followed by an examination of a suite of services and digital tools (LORE) developed by the Aus-e-Lit project that extends the scope of AustLit records and facilitates links to external resources. The focus of the final section of the paper is on a collection of Full Text resources located within the AustLit subset Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR). It proposes a number of ways in which these texts, and an accompanying anthology of critical articles, can be utilised in classrooms across the Primary, Middle and Senior School spectrum.

Creativity is as important as literacy : making a film trailer responding to literature

The first part of the title is from Sir Ken Robinson (Robinson, 2009), the esteemed educator and champion of creativity in schools. Sometimes in the face of meeting the demands of time, timetabling, demanding administration tasks and teaching for high stakes testing accountability, we can find ourselves desperate for time to remember that English has always been one of the places in schools where creativity can flourish. English is a place for the play of the imagination. English teachers are the purveyors of narrative; the keepers and teachers of stories. The new Australian Curriculum: English, (Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2012) asks us to be using ICT technologies in creative ways to tell those stories. The curriculum asks students to access texts receptively and to then speak about, write and create texts productively. There are so many interesting things to do with texts beyond word processing of print based resources. Responding to literature through media is always an alternative option to writing or simply speaking about it. In this paper my QUT pre-service student Chrystal Armitage describes how she made a mini story via a film trailer in response to a short story, ‘Turned’ (Gilman, 1987) in the unit, Literature in Secondary Teaching.

Pieces of a city : the art of making speculative cities, bodies, & texts

This practice-led doctorate involved the development of a collection – a bricolage – of interwoven fragments of literary texts and visual imagery explor-ing questions of speculative fiction, urban space and embodiment. As a sup-plement to the creative work, I also developed an exegesis, using a combina-tion of theoretical and contextual analysis combined with critical reflections on my creative process and outputs. An emphasis on issues of creative practice and a sustained investigation into an aesthetics of fragmentation and assem-blage is organised around the concept and methodology of bricolage, the eve-ryday art of ‘making do’. The exegesis also addresses my interest in the city and urban forms of subjectivity and embodiment through the use of a range of theorists, including Michel de Certeau and Elizabeth Grosz.

The value of books : the fantastic flying books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and the social hieroglyphic of reading

The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of new technologies of subjectivity and of the literary. Most obviously, “the novel as a literary form appeared to embody and turn into an object the experience of life itself” (Park), and the novel genre came to both reflect and shape notions of interiority and subjectivity. In this same period, “A shift was taking place in the way people felt and thought about children and the accoutrements of childhood, including books and toys, were implicated in this change” (Lewis). In seeking to understand the relationships between media (e.g. books and toys), genres (e.g. novels and picture books), and modes of subjectivity, Marx’s influential theory of commodity fetishism, whereby “a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things”, has served as a productive tool of analysis. The extent to which Marx’s account of commodity fetishism continues to be of use becomes clear when the corollaries between the late eighteenth-century emergence of novels and pictures books as technologies of subjectivity and the early twenty-first century emergence of e-readers and digital texts as technologies of subjectivity are considered. This paper considers the literary technology of Apple’s iPad (first launched in 2010) as a commodity fetish, and the circulation of “apps” as texts made available by and offered as justifications for, this fetish object. The iPad is both book and toy, but is never “only” either; it is arguably a new technology of subjectivity which incorporates but also destabilises categories of reading and playing such as those made familiar by earlier technologies of literature and the self. The particular focus of this paper is on the multimodal versions (app, film, and picture book) of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which are understood here as a narrativisation of commodity fetishism, subjectivity, and the act of reading itself.

Multimodality, media, and access to multiliteracies

In many English-speaking countries bilingual and multilingual speakers of English are integrated into mainstream classrooms, where the teacher is expected to help them “catch up” with speakers of the dominant language. In this presentation, I argue that we teach in culturally and linguistically diverse societies that are increasingly interconnected through a broadened range of multimodal and digital textual practices. Intuitively, one might expect that multimodal approaches are more equitable than exclusively print-based approaches because learners can draw from a broader range of semiotic resources. Yet the potentials of using multiple modes and new digital media to provide greater access to multiliteracies cannot be assumed. I draw on a case study of a multilingual language learner, Paweni, a Thai immigrant, describing how she and her peers negotiated cultural and linguistic difference. These encounters occur during multiliteracies lessons involving both print and digital texts. I theorise a “dialectic of access” to explain the reciprocal interaction between the agency of learners, modes, and media. I apply Giddens’ structuration theory to take into account the social structures – domination, signification, and legitimation – that played an important role in this dialectic of access.

CUOL – "See You Online" : teaching strategies for digital literacy practices in the English curriculum

Literacy educator Kathy Mills, observes that creating multimodal and digital texts is an essential part of the national English curriculum in Australia. Here, she presents five practical and engaging ways to transform conventional writing tasks in a digital world.

The kineikonic mode : a multimodal analysis of students’ claymation movies

Globalised communication in society today is characterised by multimodal forms of meaning making in the context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. This research paper responds to these imperatives, applying Halliday's (1978, 1994) categories of systemic functional linguistics - representational or ideational, interactive or interpersonal, and compositional or textual meanings. Following the work of Kress (2000), van Leeuwen (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996), and Jewitt (2006), multimodal semiotic analysis is applied to claymation movies that were collaboratively designed by Year 6 students. The significance of this analysis is the metalanguage for textual work in the kineikonic mode - moving images.

Exploring intercultural and ethical understanding through ‘Ethical Intelligence’ and drama, in Asian texts for the Australian curriculum : English

This paper focuses on Australian texts with Asian representations, which will be discussed in terms of Ethical Intelligence (Weinstein, 2011) explored through drama. This approach aligns with the architecture of the Australian Curriculum: English (AC:E, v5, 2013); in particular the general capabilities of 'ethical understanding' and 'intercultural understandings.' It also addresses one aspect of the Cross Curriculum Priorities which is to include texts about peoples from Asia. The selected texts not only show the struggles undergone by the authors and protagonists, but also the positive contributions that diverse writers from Asian and Middle Eastern countries have made to Australia.

Literacy Theories for the Digital Age: Social, Critical, Multimodal, Spatial, Material and Sensory Lenses

Literacy Theories for the Digital Age insightfully brings together six essential approaches to literacy research and educational practice. The book provides powerful and accessible theories for readers, including Socio-cultural, Critical, Multimodal, Socio-spatial, Socio-material and Sensory Literacies. The brand new Sensory Literacies approach is an original and visionary contribution to the field, coupled with a provocative foreword from leading sensory anthropologist David Howes. This dynamic collection explores a legacy of literacy research while showing the relationships between each paradigm, highlighting their complementarity and distinctions. This highly relevant compendium will inspire readers to explore new frontiers of thought and practice in times of diversity and technological change.

The Australian beachspace : flagging the spaces of Australian beach texts

The Australian beach is a significant component of the Australian culture and a way of life. The Australian Beachspace explores existing research about the Australian beach from a cultural and Australian studies perspective. Initially, the beach in Australian studies has been established within a binary opposition. Fiske, Hodge, and Turner (1987) pioneered the concept of the beach as a mythic space, simultaneously beautiful but abstract. In comparison, Meaghan Morris (1998) suggested that the beach was in fact an ordinary or everyday space. The research intervenes in previous discussions, suggesting that the Australian beach needs to be explored in spatial terms as well as cultural ones. The thesis suggests the beach is more than these previously established binaries and uses Soja's theory of Thirdspace (1996) to posit the term beachspace as a way of describing this complex site. The beachspace is a lived space that encompasses both the mythic and ordinary and more. A variety of texts have been explored in this work, both film and literature. The thesis examines textual representations of the Australian beach using Soja's Thirdspace as a frame to reveal the complexities of the Australian beach through five thematic chapters. Some of the texts discussed include works by Tim Winton's Breath (2008) and Land's Edge (1993), Robert Drewe's short story collections The Bodysurfers (1987) and The Rip (2008), and films such as Newcastle (dir. Dan Castle 2008) and Blackrock (dir. Steve Vidler 1997). Ultimately The Australian Beachspace illustrates that the multiple meanings of the beach's representations are complex and yet frequently fail to capture the layered reality of the Australian beach. The Australian beach is best described as a beachspace, a complex space that allows for the mythic and/or/both ordinary at once.

Children’s accommodation during reading of Chinese and English texts

Purpose: Inaccurate accommodation during nearwork and subsequent accommodative hysteresis may influence myopia development. Myopia is highly prevalent in Singapore; an untested theory is that Chinese children are prone to these accommodation characteristics. We measured the accuracy of accommodation responses during and nearwork-induced transient myopia (NITM) after periods spent reading Chinese and English texts. Methods: Refractions of 40 emmetropic and 43 myopic children were measured with a free-space autorefractor for four reading tasks of 10-minute durations: Chinese (SimSun, 10.5 points) and English (Times New Roman, 12 points) texts at 25 cm and 33 cm. Accuracy was obtained by subtracting accommodation response from accommodation demand. Nearwork-induced transient myopia was obtained by subtracting pretask distance refraction from posttask refraction, and regression was determined as the time for the posttask refraction to return to pretask levels. Results: There were significant, but small, effects of text type (Chinese, 0.97 ± 0.32 diopters [D] vs. English, 1.00 ± 0.37 D; F1,1230 = 7.24, p = 0.007) and reading distance (33 cm, 1.01 ± 0.30 D vs. 25 cm, 0.97 ± 0.39 D; F1,1230 = 7.74, p = 0.005) on accommodation accuracy across all participants. Accuracy was similar for emmetropic and myopic children across all reading tasks. Neither text type nor reading distance had significant effects on NITM or its regression. Myopes had greater NITM (by 0.07 D) (F1,81 = 5.05, p = 0.03) that took longer (by 50s) (F1,81 = 31.08, p < 0.01) to dissipate. Conclusions: Reading Chinese text caused smaller accommodative lags than reading English text, but the small differences were not clinically significant. Myopic children had significantly greater NITM and longer regression than emmetropic children for both texts. Whether differences in NITM are a cause or consequence of myopia cannot be answered from this study.

Playing with Grammar in the Early Years : Learning about Language in the Australian Curriculum : English

As teacher/researchers interested in the pursuit of socially-just outcomes in early childhood education, the form and function of language occupies a special position in our work. We believe that mastering a range of literacy competences includes not only the technical skills for learning, but also the resources for viewing and constructing the world (Freire and Macdeo, 1987). Rather than seeing knowledge about language as the accumulation of technical skills alone, the viewpoint to which we subscribe treats knowledge about language as a dialectic that evolves from, is situated in, and contributes to a social arena (Halliday, 1978). We do not shy away from this position just because children are in the early years of schooling. In ‘Playing with Grammar’, we focus on the Foundation to Year 2 grouping, in line with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (hereafter ACARA) advice on the ‘nature of learners’ (ACARA, 2013). With our focus on the early years of schooling comes our acknowledgement of the importance and complexity of play. At a time where accountability in education has moved many teachers to a sense of urgency to prove language and literacy achievement (Genishi and Dyson, 2009), we encourage space to revisit what we know about literature choices and learning experiences and bring these together to facilitate language learning. We can neither ignore, nor overemphasise, the importance of play for the development of language through: the opportunities presented for creative use and practice; social interactions for real purposes; and, identifying and solving problems in the lives of young children (Marsh and Hallet, 2008). We argue that by engaging young children in opportunities to play with language we are ultimately empowering them to be active in their language learning and in the process fostering a love of language and the intricacies it holds. Our goal in this publication is to provide a range of highly practical strategies for scaffolding young children through some of the Content Descriptions from the Australian Curriculum English Version 5.0, hereafter AC:E V5.0 (ACARA, 2013). This recently released curriculum offers a new theoretical approach to building children’s knowledge about language. The AC:E V5.0 uses selected traditional terms through an approach developed in systemic functional linguistics (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) to highlight the dynamic forms and functions of multimodal language in texts. For example, the following statement, taken from the ‘Language: Knowing about the English language’ strand states: English uses standard grammatical terminology within a contextual framework, in which language choices are seen to vary according to the topics at hand, the nature and proximity of the relationships between the language users, and the modalities or channels of communication available (ACARA, 2013). Put simply, traditional grammar terms are used within a functional framework made up of field, tenor, and mode. An understanding of genre is noted with the reference to a ‘contextual framework’. The ‘topics at hand’ concern the field or subject matter of the text. The ‘relationships between the language users’ is a description of tenor. There is reference to ‘modalities’, such as spoken, written or visual text. We posit that this innovative approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts (see Exley and Mills, 2012). We believe there is enormous power in using literature to expose children to the richness of language and in turn develop language and literacy skills. Taking time to look at language patterns within actual literature is a pathway to ‘…capture interest, stir the imagination and absorb the [child]’ into the world of language and literacy (Saxby, 1993, p. 55). In the following three sections, we have tried to remain faithful to our interpretation of the AC:E V5.0 Content Descriptions without giving an exhaustive explanation of the grammatical terms. Other excellent tomes, such as Derewianka (2011), Humphrey, Droga and Feez (2012), and Rossbridge and Rushton (2011) provide these more comprehensive explanations as does the AC:E V5.0 Glossary. We’ve reproduced some of the AC:E V5.0 glossary at the end of this publication. Our focus is on the structure and unfolding of the learning experiences. We outline strategies for working with children in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2 by providing some demonstration learning experiences based on texts we’ve selected, but maintain that the affordances of these strategies will only be realised when teaching and learning is purposively tied to authentic projects in local contexts. We strongly encourage you not to use only the resource texts we’ve selected, but to capitalise upon your skill for identifying the language features in the texts you and the children are studying and adapt some of the strategies we have outlined. Each learning experience is connected to one of the Content Descriptions from the AC:E V5.0 and contains an experience specific purpose, a suggested resource text and a sequence for the experience that always commences with an orientation to text followed by an examination of a particular grammatical resource. We expect that each of these learning experiences will take a couple if not a few teaching episodes to work through, especially if children are meeting a concept for the first time. We hope you use as much, or as little, of each experience as is needed. Our plans allow for focused discussion, shared exploration and opportunities to revisit the same text for the purpose of enhancing meaning making. We do not want the teaching of grammar to slip into a crisis of irrelevance or to be seen as a series of worksheet drills with finite answers. Strategies for effective practice, however, have much portability. We are both very keen to hear from teachers who are adopting and adapting these learning experiences in their classrooms. Please email us on b.exley@qut.edu.au or lkervin@uow.edu.au. We’d love to continue the conversation with you over time.

Responding to literature : accessible texts for reluctant readers

The Australian Curriculum: English 5.2 states, across all year level descriptions, that “students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment”, with the level types of texts and levels of understanding developing over time (ACARA, 2014a). Problems arise when students are unable or unwilling to enjoy texts, and are reluctant to read, view, interpret, and evaluate written texts. This in turn impedes their ability to perform these texts for assessment purposes. The literacy abilities of students can vary widely within a single classroom, and it is a challenge for teachers to source and present texts which are accessible across the spectrum of reading abilities, as well as reflecting themes that are relevant and engaging for students, in addition to being consistent with the General Capabilities and Cross-Curriculum Priorities of the AC:E. In senior English also, the mainstream Qld Senior Syllabus (QSA, 2010, p. 6) requires that students have learning experiences developed through 15-20 literary texts, including the in-depth study of a complete novel. In the leisure context of English Communications, students may also “write stories, poems, or song lyrics” (QSA, 2004, p. 14). Since students’ responses to literature often take the form of other imaginative text creation we address this in this paper. We start by offering synopses of some accessible texts and strategies for teachers with these students who are unwilling or low literacy readers in junior secondary and senior level English. This paper canvases some easily read novels and some films with companion text suggestions which may serve as models for students responses. For the junior secondary texts, we identify how these align with the architecture of the Australian Curriculum’s General Capabilities and Cross Curriculum Priorities. Then, we will outline some suitable imaginative responses as possible assessment outcomes, such as short stories and digital stories.