Students' construction of a virtual museum for multimodal meaning-making : the case of a pilot intervention

This paper evaluates a pilot design research intervention of 12-13 year old Secondary (Middle) students in Singapore constructing a virtual museum within an English Language (EL) curriculum which seeks to engage students through the infusion of authentic, rich multimodal stimuli. 78 students from two classes designed the layout of museum galleries based on their chosen themes, sourced and created multimodal artifacts , and presented their proposals and galleries to an imagined external audience and their peers. The research design and methodology, processes and factors driving the design and implementation of the project are described. Feedback from teachers and students on the benefits and limitations of the study are elicited through semi-constructed interviews, surveys and questionnaire forms. Recommendations to overcome problems identified are proposed.

Multiliteracies : resources for meaning-making in the secondary english classroom

This chapter draws on practitioner research with classes in a surburban secondary college in Melbourne, Australia to examine some of the complex interactions between school literacy practices and the literacy practices students engage in within school and outside of school. In particular, it focuses on student texts as instances of successful experiences of using multiliteracies for reading, writing and speaking in English classrooms.

Embracing prior professional experience in meaning making: views from international students and academics

This paper explores the views of international students and academic staff on the use of prior professional experience in disciplinary academic writing in Australian higher education. The main finding of this case study indicates that disciplinary practice related to the issue of whether, and how, students should represent aspects of their prior professional experience in disciplinary writing seems to be differently reproduced from the lenses of international student and lecturers. Within the current higher education practices, the diverse dimensions of prior professional experiences that international students bring into the learning context appear to count more in oral class discussion than in academic writing and in formal assessment. Furthermore, despite the rhetoric of internationalization of the curriculum and “inclusivity”, the valid academic practices of international students seem to be marginalized and delegitimized due to the very subtlety and inconsistence of the lecturers’ expectations. The paper concludes with the implications for institutions to more effectively address the needs of international students in terms of knowledge construction in the process of implementing diversity principles within the internationalization agenda.

A multiliteracies perspective on the new literacies

The new communications environment of the 21st century offers unprecedented opportunities for multimodal meaning making, a transformed dynamics of social agency and divergence of discourses. Multi-literacies theory presents a set of educationally useable conceptual schemas and suggestions for an expanded repertoire of literacy practices as a response to these opportunities (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000a). The following discusses the theory and case study of a collaborative application if a set of schemas to address contemporary issues in multiliteracies pedagogy (Cloonan, 2008a).

Challenges of multimedia self-presentation : taking, and mistaking, the show on the road

One privilege enjoyed by new-media authors is the opportunity to realize representations of Self that are rich textual worlds in themselves and also to engage the wider world, with a voice, a smile, imagery, and sound. Still, closer investigation of multimedia composition practices reveals levels of complexity with which the verbal virtuoso is unconcerned. This article argues that while technology-afforded multimedia tools make it comparatively easy to author a vivid text, it is a multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize and publicize an authorial intention. Based on analysis of the digital story creation process of a youth named “Steven,” the authors attempt to demonstrate the operation of two forces upon which the successful multimodal realization of the author's intention may hinge: “fixity” and “fluidity.” The authors show how, within the process of digital self-representation, these forces can intersect to influence multimodal meaning making, and an author's life, in consequential ways.

Creating multimodal metalanguage with teachers

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students’ interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to support teacher and student discussion of the meaning-making dimensions of multimodal texts. Theoretical work on the development of multimodal metalanguage is in its early stages, lacking ready application for use in diverse classroom contexts. This article reports on research into applications of a framework designed to help teachers add depth and breadth to teaching and learning about multimodal meanings through development of a metalanguage (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). While application of this framework in middle-years classrooms was initially found to be problematic, working in collaboration with teachers this framework was adapted and enriched for classroom use. This resulted in a refined framework which can be used in classrooms for stimulating metalanguage to describe multimodal texts.

Multimodal synthesis and the voice of the multimedia author in a Japanese EFL context

This paper examines a powerful potential of multimodal design: meaning that transcends the total semiotic contribution of a text's constituent parts. With reference to data drawn from the digital storytelling practices of Japanese university students, the author argues and demonstrates that in the current semiotic climate, characterised by the increasing availability and complexity of communication tools and ready appropriation of available designs, practices of multimedia authorship truly can evince expression that is authentically multiplicative. However, this sort of meaning making does not automatically come about. Controlling the inherent polysemy of multimodal texts, in the author's view, is a matter of recognising points of semantic correspondence among co-deployed images, language, etc. and creating syntheses of potential meaning that cut across these semiotic modes. The author further argues that it is in this way that the voice of the multimodal author can most clearly be heard, particularly in cases in which a language learner–author integrates elements within a multimedia text that encode meaning in the L2.

Cultural feelings and the making of meaning

Cultural feelings are an undertheorised area of the human experience which are recently gaining attention and which need to be understood in the context of museum visitor studies where they are largely ignored. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), this paper unearths the conditions of meaning-making or hermeneutic foundations that facilitate the subsequent processes of meaning-making or interpretations. It argues that the engagement with a museum space starts on a sensory, emotive and embodied level. Visitors’ narrations of their visit to the museum reveal that emotions and feelings are not separate stages of the museum experience but are continuously interwoven with intellectual and interpretive processes. Importantly, the empirical evidence shows that certain meanings remain on an embodied level as an ‘internal understanding’ and resist any verbal ‘expressibility’. The conditions flow into the processes of meaning-making during cross-cultural encounters within the material museum world. Here, feelings enter into the realm of culture and thus into the experience of heritage.

Space and loss: spirituality and symbolic connectedness in contemporary culture

This paper examines the significance of space in the experience, stories and memories of loss and grief. While for many religions the earth is an important element in rituals around birth, death and burial, in increasingly secular and multi-cultural societies, church and public cemeteries are no longer the dominant sacred sites, nor is religion the only way of defining ‘spirituality’. The paper describes shifts in religious and secular practices in dealing with loss and grief, presents case studies of traditional and contemporary frameworks in which ritual, storytelling and space are important elements of meaning making processes, and invites further examination of the ways in which artmaking restores a sense of control and meaning after the experience of loss.

Western science and Islamic learners

This article reports on two research projects (one in Malaysia and one in Australia) that studied the experiences of Islamic background learners studying western science. Conceptually, this research program is conducted within a socially constructivist discourse and employs both quantitative and qualitative forms of data collection. The article illustrates ways in which learners' meaning-making in science education is shaped by faith and culture and has the potential to expand our grasp of the expressions, implications and limitations of the constructivist hypothesis in education. In this sense it has an `equality of opportunity' agenda by working to improve access to, and experience in, the science curriculum for Muslim students.