Anne Cloonan- 2008
Intervening for intellectual quality in multimodal metalanguage in Years 5 & 6
The aims of this research are to:
- extend middle years teachers' capacities to purposefully deploy mulitmodal metalanguage through the use of theoretical schemas supporting multimodal design (representational, social, organisational, contexutal and ideological meaning -making resources in linguistic, audio, visual, gestural and spatial modes).
- expore the applicability of theoretical schemas (previously used by the researcher as an analytical tool) for development of a multimodal metalanguage as a stimuli for teacher professional learning.
This is a proposal for targeted intervention within an existing teacher professional learning program deploying two schemas to promote development of and recording of elements of a teacher-generated multimodal metalanguage. One of the schemas (New London Group, 2000) has been used successfully in professional learning stiuations to support teacher development (Cloonan, forthcoming). The second proposed schema (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000) was used by the researcher as an analytical tool in previous research. It draws on a range of influences including social semiotics (Halliday, 1985)' amd critical literacies (Fairclough, 1992, Gee, 1992).
The proposed research involves teachers as researchers of their own classroom textual pratices. Within the context of the current program, the focus would be the development of teacher examples of teaching of multimodal metalanguage, or teaching about as well as through multimodality. This proposal has the support of the Catholic Education Office, Melbourne.
