ETL402 Module 5

Educating teachers about multi-literacies

Recently the teachers of our school had a day of PD related to literacy across the Australian curriculum. As an introduction to multi-literacies were we each given a double sided A3 sheet with scanned texts from 30 different sources (including sheet music, formula for specialist math, street map, poem, French extract, road symbols, cricket scores and stats, etc.). We were asked to identify the text, what its likely source is, what literacy skills were needed to decode the text and how easy each of these was for us to read. While most of us could not read every text type (I have no idea how to read cricket stats) we were able to suggest skills needed to read each.

How would you support classroom teachers to ‘access and learn more literate practices’?

Whenever I trial something new with my class and there is some degree of success I like to share that activity with others. If it is a digital program this may require some level of educating them how to use it. Most recently I have been able to share about using pathfinders and Google docs.

I currently work as a science teacher and as I have been studying the roles of the TL I have been introducing new literacies to my science department to bring about changes there. A problem we faced last year was that we did not change to an Australian curriculum textbook meaning the content in the textbook we were using was sometimes miss-matched with the level. For one topic in particular which was missing from the textbook I developed a bound resource with multi-literacies in mind, which contained:

• Selected parts of the ‘energy’ chapter in an Australian curriculum text

• A place to take class notes within the textbook

• Parts of a physics anime (comic), some text boxes were removed for students to fill in with their own thoughts or predictions

• Experiments and a place to include any spread sheets and graphs produced in excel (or similar)

• Links to related games and videos from Scootle and other sources.

• Inclusion of assignment details (the production of a music video, PowerPoint, comic or other media to explain a form of energy to a group of younger students).

This was given out in print form and students also had access to a digital form.

This was given to other teachers so they could also use it with their class if needed.  This took a lot of time and effort to do on my own. If we had a teacher librarian at the school collaboration on the creation of such a resource would have reduced the effort of an individual teacher. From what I have seen at my school teachers have couple of big projects which they put a lot of time and effort into planning over school holidays and then the rest of the time they use whatever material is available to get the job done. Planning time during the semester is not as abundant as the school holidays; a collaborative planning relationship with a TL could alleviate this issue a bit.