Main Feature: Kathy Mills, Len Unsworth, and Laura Scholes, authors of the book “Literacy for Digital Futures”, discuss how the concept of literacy has evolved in the 21st century, where digital technologies are increasingly integrated into our communication and daily lives. The book explores the idea that literacy is no longer just about print-based skills, but also involves knowledge of digital platforms and technologies, including coding and gaming.
Regular Features: Kolber’s Corner, Steven Kolber presents strategies for increasing productivity with easily accessible apps; Ideology in Education, Tom Mahoney continues his reflection on the ideologies underpinning the Science of Learning movement; Education in the News, Cameron reflects on the sudden announcement of the departure of the NSW Education Secretary.
Timecodes:
00:00 Opening Credits
01:31 Intro
03:34 Kolber’s Corner
10:48 Ideology in Education
19:31 Education in the News
30:44 Feature introdcution
33:31 Interview – Literacy for Digital Futures
01:29:28 Patron Shout Outs
Links:
– Support TER Podcast at www.Patreon.com/TERPodcast
– Steven Kolber on Twitter
– Tom Mahoney on Twitter
– Literacy for Digital Futures – full text
– Kathy MIlls ACU profile
– Len Unsworth ACU profile
– Laura Scholes ACU profile
Read more for transcripts
Feature Interview Transcript (Generated by Otter.ai – unedited)
Cameron Malcher
Joining me now are the authors of literacy for Digital Futures mind body text. If you could please introduce yourselves.
Kathy Mills
Well, hello, I’m Kathy Mills from the Australian Catholic University and I’m based in Brisbane. I’m a professor of digital literacies research, and I’m talking today about our book.
Ken Unsworth
Hi, I’m Hi everybody, I’m Ken Unsworth. And I was a teacher for a long time in Queensland. And after that, I became a professor of English and literacies education in a few different universities, Sydney, University of New England, Griffith University and now I’m at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.
Laura Scholes
Hi, I’m Laura Scholes, I also used to be a teacher, predominantly in Prep to Year Three, and in Queensland, and currently I’m at Australian Catholic University, also an institute of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences. And my focus at the moment is really on improving reading experiences and reading outcomes for students.
Cameron Malcher
Thank you. Well, welcome to the TER podcast, in unpacking this book, and, and getting into some of the content, which I suppose we should let our listeners know, also, this book is available for open access, if people want to look at the content. You know, that was one of the great things, I got to actually delve into some of the contents of this book before, before speaking to you. But one of the things that really, I want to unpack at the beginning is, what do you mean by literacy? Let’s unpack this concept of literacy. Could you devote a little bit of time to exactly what that means in a broader context? Well, that’s a
Kathy Mills
really good question. If I can just jump in here. I think illiteracy has many different definitions, but one that has increasingly intrigued me in the 21st century is the way in which print print based literacies are no longer the only way that we communicate. So conventionally, we’ve thought of literacy as kind of like the three Rs Reading, Writing arithmetic, perhaps. But nowadays, we’re seeing that technologies are connected with literacy practices in a really, fundamentally different way. So that when we interact with texts, whether they be digitally or in print, they’re changing all the time. And if students don’t have access to the knowledge of those digital platforms, their literacy practices are, you know, affected in a really significant way. And so that convergence of literacy and technology is where my research sets. And it’s it, it comes through issues of digital divides and access to literacy, which really key questions.
Ken Unsworth
Yeah, I can follow up on that a bit. I mean, I’m interested in digital technology and literacy as well. I’ve been around as a teacher of English and literacy for a long time. But I’ve come to be very clear that into in the 21st century that that our kids are growing up into, we need to think of literacy as not just involving print. But we’ve known for a long time that involves images as well. And not only still images, but moving images. So that’s a really important part of literacy. And it’s not only in English, it’s in the other subject areas as well. So, you know, one of the things that that I talked about in the book is bringing things that people might not think of traditionally as belonging to a literacy curriculum, like coding computer programming, into the English curriculum, as well as in other subject areas. So I think these days in this multimedia, digital online world, we need to have a very broad definition of the literacies that kids are going to need in the world that they’re growing up into.
Laura Scholes
So following on from that, from what Kathy and Lana have shared in the volume, I also talk about gaming as the legitimate text that should be used in classrooms. So when we’re talking about literacies, I guess we’re talking about recalibrating what some people teachers, parents, even myself, have thought about literacy and, and opening up to these new literacies that are now becoming part of everyday life for many children. And it’s really exciting that there’s four states in Australia now that have just there have given access to educators to download more Minecraft so ICT just recently made that decision. So this these practices are coming into the classroom. And so they’re becoming very topical for for teachers who want to support their students.
Cameron Malcher
So I suppose let’s, you know, let’s just throw the gate wide open. You know, you mentioned gaming there, obviously, Laura is one key technology that is affecting literacy, what are some of the ways that technology is influencing the need to be literate or to see literacy in a different way?
Kathy Mills
I think one of the big ways that we’re seeing change is through the internet. So around the year 2000, we had a really interesting publication by the New London group called multiliteracies, designs for social futures. And that was the first book I read, that really got me thinking about how texts are now interconnected. And because of the rise of the Internet, we’ve now got access to texts anywhere, anytime. Then we saw the advent of the mobile phone, which brought a lot of text to our pockets, so to speak. And then we also had the rise of web two, which is called the social web. So no longer were we just looking at web pages, but everyone could be a reader or writer of the web. And this changes the actual interactivity of reading and writing, because we’ve got authors and writers in an immediate space where they can toss text back and forth. And we get different types of rhythms to the texts, it’s very different to say writing an essay and a book that’s going to be read by a teacher, rather than worldwide audiences, for example.
Ken Unsworth
Think about it in terms of kids experience. So if I think of my oldest granddaughter, who’s just left school now, but a few years ago, she was crazy about the Harry Potter stories, she read all the Harry Potter stories, she watched all the Harry Potter movies several times, I might add to the point that she could practically recite them. But not only that, there was a follow up with the Harry Potter games, and she played multiple games about Harry Potter. So you know, from an English and literature point of view, these days, kids experience of story. And literature is not just on a page in a book, their experience of literature and the stories that mean a lot to them, via technology. And a lot of these that are available, you know, portably now on iPads and smartphones, and so on, the the experience of the story is a bodily one. So you find kids, you know, shaking the iPhone to mix a magic potion, for example, or rotating the iPhone, or the iPad, to get a different perspective on things. So even if you think about it, from the experience of kids in the in the real world, that they’re that they’re living, you just need to connect with, with digital technology to in fact experience the literature that kids are experiencing today.
Laura Scholes
And more on the you know, social cultures that they’re engaging with social media, I guess it’s something that we we can’t deny as part of kids everyday literacy experiences. And so for a lot of kids, they need more critical analysis when they’re either processing or composing on these kinds of sites. And, you know, schools are actually engaging in some of those social media opportunities in very academic and worthwhile ways. But kids are also engaging in some of these social practices in ways that, you know, needs support and can be healthy, but also bring on unhealthy outcomes.
Cameron Malcher
Well, just to pick up on a couple of the features that have come through in those responses, obviously, you’re talking about the way that digital technologies make engagement, more of an interactive, and I think the word you used when was embodied experience, as well as just a, you know, one of reading, as well as that interactivity of either posting and responding or engaging in community. What is it that that does to our understanding of literacy or what does that do to students capacity to interpret information that needs to be made the focus of something specific or a specific practice?
Kathy Mills
I think that students now need to engage with different aspects of the text in that text are now multimodal. So we talk about this a bit in the book, in that students are not just dealing with print in a very predictable linear format, but students are actually dealing with different materialities of text. So it might be that they’re doing virtual reality and, and they’re moving around in a 3d immersive environment. And there’s words coming up, and there’s images, and they have all of this information to process as well as auditory information. And so in these multimodal environments, there’s lots of nuances to how these different modes interrelate. And that’s a really key aspect of our work and the work in the book, and an aspect that students have to be aware of. And interestingly, the Australian Curriculum is a bit on the forefront of this worldwide because it actually has multimodal literacy mentioned hundreds of times, and a lot of my colleagues in the United States are very envious of teachers here, that we have that freedom to actually address multimodal practices in the classroom and multimodal literacies and teach students about interpreting images interpreting sound and the way that those modes work together.
Ken Unsworth
I think we can, we can think of it from our own experience when I mean, we’re very alert to the idea that many, many printed literary works appear in film, both for adults and for kids. And more frequently, these days, they appear in at least two formats anyway, and probably more. And often we get into comparing diversions. And, you know, some people get annoyed that they think, Well, you know, one version wasn’t the same as the other and so on. But the so called affordances, the what you can communicate in one mode is not exactly the same as what you can communicate in a different mode. So what that means is that the interpretive possibilities that are created are different, the story might be essentially pretty much the same, but because of different emphases, different things that can be shown to a greater or lesser extent, then how you read and interpret the message can be slightly different. A great example from Australia is Shawn tans really popular story called The last thing, and I think many of your listeners will have both read the picture book, and probably quite a lot of them have seen the animated movie of the last thing, which in fact, you know, was was very successful commercially. Now, the film and the picture book are very similar in terms of the verbal content, very similar. But visually, there are some important differences. And even though the language is almost the same, the interpretive possibilities that are managed by the differences in the images are very significant. So the same kind of thing applies when you find stories on say, the iPad format. So then the kids participate in the affordances. So what they can do by dragging, rotating, pinching, can change what you actually see in the story. And hence can change the kinds of interpretations that are possible. So building up that experience that critical perspective on the different forms, in my case of literature, that kids experience are really crucial part of, of English and literacy education.
Laura Scholes
So in one of the chapters in the book, we talk in depth about how the internet is changing experiences for students. And, you know, that’s really changing how kids engage their mind as well in terms of having to, you know, integrate all sorts of information, fake news, disinformation, competing agendas, and having to have a skill set that allows them to evaluate this endless amount of information. So that’s really changing the cognitive skills that students need. And a lot of times they haven’t been prepared for that. And they are often compound, you know, they’ve, they come across, I guess, algorithm bias. So AI is now giving them more information. They do a Google search, or they search something of interest and then they just keep getting the same I have information that aligns with their beliefs or the stance that they’ve taken. So there’s a real need for us to be teaching kids about the criteria for evaluating these sort of, you know, these competing sources of information, how to identify what is fake news or disinformation and, and how you know, the criteria that they can use to evaluate websites and evidence. So I think that’s one critical change. As you move from, you know, traditional print textbooks to inquiry on the internet, I did a recent study with middle school students and ask them how they would go about, you know, finding reliable sources. And the majority said, oh, you can’t trust the internet, don’t go to the internet. And Wikipedia is the worst, but they didn’t have any, they didn’t have any criteria or skills. There are very few kids who said, Well, I look at who produce a white website, I look across, you know, multiple sites of evidence, and I’m, and then I would, you know, get some criteria. Does that sound right? Does that, you know, does that fit with the other evidence I’ve had, you know, there was a handful of kids out of 45, who had those skills. And, you know, the majority was saying, just stay away from the internet. But the internet is full of evidence and research and useful information, they need the skills to evaluate it. But if
Cameron Malcher
they were saying, Stay away from the Internet, what was their trusted source?
Laura Scholes
People, people, which was very interesting, and very, you know, they’re looking for the one truth, very black and white, I’ll go and ask a person, somebody at school, the librarian, might parents, a friend. So they just wanted that one source of truth without having to wade through this endless amount of information that they would have to actually evaluate.
Kathy Mills
And Nora makes a great point there. And her section of the book was really talking a lot about the mind and how students have to bring in these different intellectual or cognitive skills that they bring to these new digital texts. But what the book does is it has three sections. And the way we’ve thought about it is that the mind is one aspect that’s different. The other aspect is the body. So the body is engagement with texts. And that’s important, we don’t tend to think of the body and the mind being so connected, but they are so that when when we read something on a screen, it’s different for our brain than if we read it on a piece of paper. If we hold something, if we’re moving as we speak, or learn, it’s different than when we’re sitting. And so this is called embodied cognition. And it’s the connection between what we do in the physical world, and how it changes the way we think and the way we process texts. So that’s a whole section in the book. And that gets into all the AR VR and the different technologies that have these radically revised bodily interactions that are different to the past. And the third section is the one on text. So where lens work has come in, is his ability to look at networks of textual practices in terms of all the little aspects of grammar. So the new grammars that students need, because if teachers are going to take digital texts into the classroom, what is what are the nuts and bolts of these texts, what’s what parts are new. And so that’s the part where Len has done a lot of work in expanding our notion of what these grammars are, so that we’ve got a systematic basis for looking at these new texts.
Ken Unsworth
So Cameron, maybe just to pick up on that a little bit. Because technology’s not only sort of changing literacies, in the sense that, you know, all of us, including the kids are engaging with digital platforms a lot. But it’s also changing the literacies that we still negotiate in paper media texts. And one of the phenomenon that’s occurring is the, to use a bit of a jargon mystic term that images are becoming like the rhetorical locus of texts. In other words, texts used to be organized around words with some images accompany, but more and more. What’s happening is that it’s the image that’s the core and text is built around an image, and it largely comes from screen based platforms, where material is condensed, condensed through the use of images and annotate shins and in interpolated text blocks. So you get a lot on the screen and possibly with hyperlinks out to other screens, which is similarly condensed. But, but one impact of that is it in paper media texts. Now, you find a lot of the presentations are in what we might call infographic formats. So again, even if it’s a paper media text, the central locus, or the images, and the texts are interpolated and built around them, then that that means, on the one hand, a different set of quote unquote, reading practices that integrate the images and the language as kind of one eye fall, if you like. And also in composing kids are increasingly asked to compose texts that have this kind of feature. Think of the number of times kids are asked to produce things like PowerPoint representations of what they’ve learned, and so on. So it’s a different kind of reading, it’s a visual verbal integration are reading. And it’s a different kind of, quote, unquote, writing or creating. It’s a visual verbal, integration of text and images in text production, as well. So those are changes that affect not only our interaction with digital platforms, that our interaction with paper media platforms, as well.
Cameron Malcher
So when you talk about there being new grammars of texts, and new ways that information is organized and presented. And you know, thinking back to your example, Laura, of middle school students, you know, there are students in high school today who were born after the last Encyclopedia Britannica was ever printed, before it became an entirely online and very multimedia presentation. How much of when you say there’s a difference in the way we engage with print versus how we engage with multimedia text? How much of that is because of the way people are raised or what they’re familiar with from an early age? And how much of it is intrinsic to the way people process information visually and orally? You know, for example, and I suppose the ultimate question I’m getting towards is, is it the case that younger children are literally speaking and thinking in a different language and their teachers may be because of that generational gap?
Ken Unsworth
Wow, there’s a lot in the camera. And yet, just ask the blockbuster question, you
Kathy Mills
need to do a study Karen, where you have younger learners processing something like say information on a screen versus a bunch of older, reading something on a screen, and then looking at the comprehension differences, which there may be, there’s some studies specifically on that. And I was talking about this to my daughter the other day, and I said, Oh, look, they’ve found that people edit text much better when it’s offline, when they’re looking at a piece, like an actual printed up document. And she said, Well, yeah, but how old were the participants? You said, because I can really see errors on the screen, I find it really easy. And I thought, well, maybe that’s true. Did they really have, you know, 12 year olds were in their study? So I think it’s a really good question, that there’s
Laura Scholes
some researchers that are proposing that because of plasticity of the brain that younger people will and are adapting to these new platforms. And there’s still controversy about whether people comprehend better on print or on on screens. And it seems to depend on the genre. So narrative text does make any difference information text depends on the time given. It can fit on line it can take longer for for kids. So there’s a lot of research trying to find these, you know, answers to these key questions. But the The facts are that we don’t know because, you know, there’s kids that are growing up that head of iPad, you know, as a pacifier. And we don’t know yet how that’s going to play out. But we do know that it, it does change what the mind does. There’s cognitive overload, often, there’s, there’s fragmented experiences, there’s no material anchors anymore. Kids can’t go back to their favorite page of the book, and turn the pages and smell the book. So all of these things are changing. So maybe we need an with maybe we collectively need to do some research on that longitudinally.
Kathy Mills
I mean, I’ve been working with students this week doing virtual reality with a program called titans of space, which is an online on exploration about a space, and it also has text for the students to read in a virtual environment. So they’re in fully immersed with, you know, a headset on, they’re seeing this 3d world flying through space and coming up to planets. And some of the interesting things when I asked the students, you know, questions like, Is it easier to comprehend the text that you’re seeing, then when you are read than if you’re reading a book. So if you’re reading a book about space, do you see any differences. And some of them said, it’s not really that you don’t need concentration, they said, actually, there’s so much going on, there’s, you know, the planets, and there’s all this, you know, stuff that I want to reach out and touch and interact with. And sometimes I’m just blotting out the words, because I’m more interested in the images. And so it’s a different type of concentration. So it’s interesting that it depends on the particular learning context. So even when they design virtual reality games that have the subtitles right in front of the child, and when you move your head, the words are moving with you, your brain can just block that out. And you can be focused on all the other things that are interesting you in that environment. And so it very much seems to be context dependent. And also different learners have different approaches. So watching, you know, a dozen kids use the same program, they all interacted with it very differently. Some wanted to actually do more haptic engagement, some weren’t reading the dashboard to get deeper information and wanting to get into the words more and deeper knowledge. And others were just sort of wanting to understand the relative sizes of the planets by traveling through more of space to sort of experience it more holistically and gather information through their senses. So I think it really does depend on the platforms and also the learner as well.
Ken Unsworth
Another perspective, that’s important to add into that is a social perspective. So there’s a fairly strong consensus that all literacies are so called socially constructed, in other words, that literacies that we can access and use are the literacies, that we have the opportunities to engage with. And that depends on lots of things, as I’m sure you know, listeners will understand, not the least of which is our socio economic positioning. So you know, that you will have seen in the news over the COVID period, to differential access, that kids from different social groups had to learning at home, depending on the accessibility experience, and so on. That they have had with respect to the hardware, and also to some extent the related experiences that their parents had had. So you know, these things do have like individual components and individual capabilities and preferences and so forth that kids exhibit, but they also have a very strong kind of social determinant of the nature of literacies, that people are able to engage well,
Cameron Malcher
to pick up on that land, because it sort of goes back to something Kathy said at the beginning about focusing your research on access to technology as well, which is that if you know if some some schools are obviously going to be better situated to engage in digital literacies in a more meaningful and effective way. And do we risk I suppose, how do we how effectively can it be addressed in schools that do not have that level of access so that we don’t end up creating sort of a two tiered or multi tiered system where you have people who are highly digitally literate, and those who then are not even given the opportunity to develop those literacies.
Ken Unsworth
So I think this is a really fundamental issue that has applied long before we got, you know, oriented to be thinking about the digital technology, there always has been this kind of socio economic stratification of people’s access to literacies. And it’s, it’s the case, you know, like, if you think about communities, where the opportunities that parents have had for education for the kinds of literate practices that they engage in, very different from those of, say other communities. Now that does indeed have an impact. On any kinds of, of literacies, that students are trying to negotiate at school and in the community, and that, that social stratification is a fact of life, that that many people would like to brush under the carpet. Or think that, you know, it’s something that schools can compensate for. It’s extremely difficult, extremely difficult for schools to manage, especially where you have extremes of educational advantage, and disadvantage. So it’s a it’s a kind of phenomenon. It’s a part of the social structure that we live with, which has been and will be whether it’s a really complex
Kathy Mills
issue. I mean, I’ve seen lots of projects, where researchers have gone to communities to try to give access better access to digital practices. And often, you know, sometimes we can be misguided about what people actually need. I remember doing a program in America with a group of students who were on scholarships, and they were making digital using Arduino kits, which a little tech had technical components, and then they can put them into clay sculptures or artwork, and so on. So we’re teaching them programming and a whole bunch of different literacies. At the end of the program, we approached the parents and said, look, the kids have got their Arduino kits, they can take those home and use them. And this parent came up to me and said, can you use it from a mobile phone? And I said, No, no, because you need a computer, like, Do you have a computer? And she said, No, we don’t we just use my phone to get the internet. And that’s, that’s what we have in our house. And I thought, well, that’s an example of where we make assumptions that, you know, all these young people are doing digital stuff, and they’re all online. Yet, we’ve got families who still don’t have one computer in a home amongst a whole family. Now, how does that compare to a lot of middle class families who might have multiple devices per person in the household, they might have a phone and a laptop, or a phone, a laptop, and maybe an iPad? You know, and or a watch with a screen. And so we have this incredible complexity. I think I’m just assuming that schools are going to fix the problem is not really the answer. And as well, just assuming that digital practice should practices should stay outside of schools, where everyone has access isn’t true, either. And so I guess it’s something that has to have a multi strategy approach to it.
Laura Scholes
And it’s a policy issues and because, you know, we’ve we’re moving to online assessment. And you know, Pisa now, I think, since 2018, has been assessing reading online. And they’ve changed what it means to read it now as more like, you know, information literacy, multiple sourcing, and more equivalent to, you know, internet reading. So we’ve got global and national assessment moving to online platforms. So we may see what’s happened in the US where that divide between kids reading abilities becomes, you know, even more accentuated, you know, it used to be talking about the differences between boys and girls in the US now they’re talking about, you know, the access that schools and homes have to deal with devices and how that’s impacting on outcomes. So, as much as teachers, you know, always, I’ve always thought do the best that they can to support their students. They also need the infrastructure, they need Wi Fi bands, they need the computers, they need the software, and they need tech people to support that. So becomes a policy issue.
Cameron Malcher
One thing that you mentioned earlier as well, Laura, particularly was the need for students to be able to navigate misinformation or disinformation. And fake news you brought that phrase up, which has become sort of the has become a bit of a watchword of the last decade or so particularly in the since 2016. But how much I suppose the question I want to ask is, how much of the need for an increased focus on these digital literacies is about the state of the world as it is, as opposed to it actually being beneficial to the learning process? You know, Laura, you mentioned before that, you know, often engaging with digital text can come with cognitive overload. And Kathy was saying that students talked about needing to block out so much information to be able to focus on what are the actual benefits to engaging with digital literacies, as opposed to just needing to teach students to deal with the world as it currently is.
Laura Scholes
Gotta be active citizens in the world, now they have to have those literacies and digital platforms. And that’s part of learning is learning how to generate knowledge. And, you know, being able to decipher what is valid, and evidenced. So it is about learning, it’s about generating knowledge now, but also in Further Education or in in the work environment that increasingly requires these kinds of skills, you know, for decision making and critical thinking, problem solving. These are real world skills that require beyond black and white thinking. So we have to be able to think, you know, about what knowledge means, where’s it coming from? How does it influence us, and, you know, the days of didactic teaching from a textbook about content are over, and we need to, you know, be able to build on knowledge and, and use that and apply that in the real world. So I think it’s, yeah, it’s something that’s critical for learning.
Kathy Mills
I think the technology does offer a lot of support for students to learn literacies, at an earlier age, for example, the iPad, you can have quite young children, you know, two year olds interacting with the alphabet, on a, on an iPad, I’ve seen a lot of programs, which have really high engagement from the learners just by having a digital platform is getting kids engaged. And that’s one of the things you know, with our virtual reality program with, we did find the students were just wow, like, they were just stepping into the environment and just in awe and saying, I could just do this all day. And other kids were saying, you know, I don’t like reading a long book. But this is just really, I hardly even can, you know, think about the fact that I’m learning I just am. And so, you know, we do see that kids, many kids are switched on by these new practices. And so I see that all the time in our programs, I’ve worked with students across a whole range of different abilities and different ethnicities, I’ve worked with Indigenous students, and just seeing the way we can integrate things like the visual practices like art, and storytelling, and integrate those into digital storytelling, for really high engagement for many kids who have disengaged in many ways from schooling. But when when they have these practices, it does give them that extra, I guess, you know, extra motivation to want to engage with these kinds of texts.
Ken Unsworth
In any case, it’s, it’s not a choice. Like Laura said, to survive in the world, increasingly, you have to learn how to make meaning digitally. I mean, in our own experience, it’s, I’m sure many of the listeners will, will recognize that, you know, you it’s very difficult with a lot of institutions to find a person that you can actually speak to, you can’t speak to people, you can’t get someone to tell you. If you try the call center, you can sit on hold for ages and ages and ages. On the other hand, if you can navigate the online platforms, then you know, it’s possible to to pursue what what you want to pursue largely anyway, online. But we can’t assume that people just know how to do it, or that just by getting online, they’ll find out how to do it. explicit teaching, teaching, not only students, but you know, some adults as well, how these platforms make meaning, how the visual representation conveys certain things that you need to pay attention to. Because if you just look at the print, you’re not going to get the whole message, you know. So learning how these platforms with their various affordances make meaning and explicit teaching of students how they work is got to be part of literacy education into the future.
Cameron Malcher
Well, speaking of that, you know, Kathy, you mentioned earlier that digital literacy is mentioned in the national curriculum, many times compared to especially some of our other countries that we might compare ourselves to. But the other complaint that’s always not complaint. The other concern that’s always raised about the national curriculum is theirs. so much content to be worked through, what’s your advice for how to incorporate the need for this explicit teaching of digital literacies with a lot of content that needs to be delivered?
Kathy Mills
Well, I think, with multimodal literacy, it’s the actual word that they use in the curriculum. It’s integrated right through the different subjects. So it’s in English, it’s in second language learning, it’s in all those different areas. And so it doesn’t have to be thought of as something that’s tacked on, it can be very much integrated in the kinds of materials that we use. So if students are doing an English unit, on a particular piece of literature, they can then look at all the Para texts online that relate to that, whether it be a video game, or whether it be a website, whether it be some sort of visual or electronic source. And so those things can just be layered in a in a kind of natural way, I suppose. And things like assessments, many students do multimodal assessments, but they might start it as a print based text, for example, a script for something that is then turned into something else with visual images and audio or presented or so on in multiple modes. So we can embed these print based literacies, you know, in quite fluid ways into assessments, and then assessments just need a, you know, minor adaptions, in a sense to make sure that, yes, those, you know, essential printbase basics are covered. But in addition, you know, these other factors in interpreting texts have been addressed as well. And teachers have been doing that, I guess, quite well in Australia for for quite a number of years. And it does mean that a lot of teachers are making assessment rubrics to assess very unique textual products from their students and so on. I think that work is content always continuing.
Ken Unsworth
I think there’s a political perspective here, Cameron, where we could look at a political perspective. So and I think it has to do with the tremendous pressure on teachers in their work days. And, you know, a lot of the emerging digital affordances and opportunities are ones that if teachers become familiar with them, themselves, they also need time to look at how this kind of integration can occur in the curriculum in in their classrooms. And it’s absolutely unrealistic, to expect teachers to fight somehow or other Fine Time, given the pressures of their workloads at present, to really explore, you know, and investigate and look at how this kind of integration could occur. So for example, in our book, we talked about one project, which is this coding animated narratives. So in the English classroom, coding, or computer programming, can be integrated with English teaching of narrative composition, interpretation, technique, but it takes a bit of time to get used to how to do it. So I think, you know, it’s there’s an important political dimension here, and it has to do with the current, I think, fairly strong community support for looking carefully at what are we asking our teachers to do? And how realistic is it? And can’t we organize to support them in such a way that they have the opportunities to engage in the kind of professional learning that ultimately would help to make, you know, dealing with the curriculum a little easier, but you can’t do it unless there’s some kind of political will to support teachers to help them to manage it.
Laura Scholes
Yeah, know. I’d like to return to the Minecraft Education Edition as an example of how to integrate, you know, digital literacies across the curriculum. So as I mentioned, it’s now been approved in four states in Australia to be downloaded and used in classrooms. But a lot of schools aren’t taking it up because even though it has application to maths, science and literacy, and there’s a plethora of free activities aligned to the Australian Curriculum, they don’t have the time or the skill set or the experience or the confidence to engage with that. So I was at a school just Last week at painted 12, with over one of the largest in Queensland with almost 4000 students. And they’re really keen to engage with Minecraft to, you know, look at how that could engage boys in digital texts. But they said, we don’t even have the software downloaded, we don’t have, we don’t even know where to start. So there’s this desire, and there’s, it’s like, there’s the desire, and then there’s the the the platforms that would enable it, but in the middle, we need something to support teachers and schools and structures to come together.
Cameron Malcher
Yeah, in I mean, in my experience in schools, it’s often been the result of either an individual or a group of passionate teachers taking it on board as a personal project rather than a systemic thing. I don’t know if that mirrors your observation
Kathy Mills
definitely helps if a principal is on board. So we’ve been involved with some projects, where there were University School collaborations, and when we had really good uptake from the principal, they provided the supports for the teachers for the professional development and, and getting key teachers to be sort of catalyst for, for rolling out those multimodal literacy practices in their year levels, and in a sort of systematic way, and then growing it in a realistic way across the school over a number of years. And so, I’ve seen it done really well. But it does need that support, at least from the principals side. And then as well, you know, doing collaborations with universities or other organizations outside the school, I think can help as well to add to those resources.
Cameron Malcher
So, thinking again, about how this manifests in schools and teaching. Given that you each had your own particular perspective and content that you contributed to this book, I’d like to ask each of you, for a teacher reading this book, what is the main takeaway you would hope they would get from from your particular sections?
Kathy Mills
Well, my section apart from the the introduction, the conclusion is the mind is the body. So the connection between how students relate to texts in them in more embodied ways or engage their bodies differently than in the past, we’ve always had bodies before his, you know, picked up books and kids have chewed on books and had board books and bath books and all sorts of things. And so it has had a tactile and an element. But we need to be aware of how these different materials engagement with texts are changing more rapidly now than in the past. So where Tech’s were relatively predictable and stable in the past, we’re seeing a kind of exponential curve change. And so in my book, I talk a lot about in the in the body section a lot about the different sensors that we use. So there’s a section on. On audio, there’s a section on taste and smell, and its connections to how we interpret information as well. So there’s some quite new research there, which I think a lot of teachers will find quite intriguing. And many teachers have been engaging with sort of sensory type activities for students for some time. And there are philosophies of teaching that sort of stemmed back to those kind of, I guess, Montessori type traditions, but it’s looking at texts in this way that how students are going to engage with those texts physically, does affect the way our brain is going to remember that information and process that information. And if teachers are aware of that, it can really help when they’re structuring their lessons with texts.
Ken Unsworth
So Cameron, maybe all hark back to the decoding animated narratives. Example. Because we’ve been working on a project with your six teachers in the primary school and year seven English teachers in a secondary school, none of which have had any prior experience or knowledge with computer programming or coding zero. And so far, we’ve worked across four schools with 10 teachers. In two of those schools, the schools themselves have decided to extend the program to all year five and year six classes. in our schools. And so what what’s happened is that with going from no experience at all, was a modest opportunity for some targeted professional learning those English teachers. And those years, six teachers have managed to conduct very successful programs of having the students in their class code, these animated micro narratives, demonstrating that they can meet the English curriculum requirements for, you know, creating narrative texts, and increasing the kids understandings of how to interpret visual texts, moving image texts, and so on. So, you know, I think we’ve talked today in like, fair, necessarily, I guess, in fairly general terms, but we should point out that our book is replete with practical examples of teachers doing things with students, and, and if we can organize some time to support teachers, with a modest amount of opportunity for professional learning, I think, you know, very significant, innovative work can take place.
Laura Scholes
So in my section of the book, and look at some of the new reading practices that are emerging, and, and probably just highlight for teachers, things, they already know that, you know, there’s this lack of deep reading, and kids are, you know, jumping from hyperlink to page to page, and there, there’s often there’s often some, you know, issues for teachers when they’re trying to get that deep comprehension. So it will just confirm from research some of those things that they’re probably seeing on a daily, you know, basis, but then it also adds some real life strategies about, you know, how can we engage with students when they’re doing inquiry, you know, learning if they’re approaching a project, here’s some steps that we can scaffold in the classroom? How can we get students to think about knowledge, you know, in more evaluative way, how can we move kids from thinking about just the truth, black and white beliefs to more, you know, strategies to get them to thinking about subjective perspectives that, you know, there are different beliefs, and then how to evaluate. So there’s actual steps there, that concrete things that teachers could trial. And, you know, there’s some examples of, you know, application to setting an assignment for students and how to scaffold through that. So try to make it research informed, to can, you know, give a little bit more illumination, you know, illuminate some of the things that are happening, and why those things they might be seeing are happening. But also, here’s some steps to support students and to, you know, advance their critical thinking, that’s going to go across the curriculum and improve their outcomes.
Kathy Mills
And Laura section also has a really great chapter on video games for literacy, which is very popular, I’m getting lots of people asking for copies of it, they don’t realize the whole book is open access, and I’m getting one on one requests for that chapter. For some reason, that seems to be quite of interest to researchers and teachers at the moment as well.
Laura Scholes
Yeah, cuz I talk about how that is actually developing, you know, an evaluative or advanced epistemology because kids are making decisions quickly. So it’s, it’s, it’s teaching them to focus. And it’s actually really good for kids with ADHD. And they’ve been using it with children with reading, you know, needing reading support. So it’s about the executive functions that become very focused, and they develop these really hard, you know, honed skills. So that’s good to hear Kathy.
Ken Unsworth
Cameron, I’d like to include an ad before we stop for the Australian Catholic University, and if schools have a look at this book and decide they want to get something going on literacy for Digital Futures in their schools or their systems, contact us at ACU
Cameron Malcher
Well, I will make sure there’s a link not only to the full text of the book, but also to your profiles and contact details on your various Institute websites. So Kathy Lynn, Laura, thank you very much for your time and for taking the time to put together this fascinating exploration of what literacy means in this increasingly digital world
Ken Unsworth
thanks thanks for the opportunity came thanks Cameron