Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemNew technologies and literacy pedagogy: a case study of two Victorian government schools( 2005)This study investigates the ways in which a sample group of state secondary school teachers are adapting literacy pedagogy to incorporate new technologies. Research in the area of literacy education indicates that the literacy requirements of citizens in the new century will, and in fact already do, differ remarkably from those of ten or twenty years ago. The traditional perception of literacy as a print-orientated, alphabetically coded skill base has been variously problematised and challenged in recent years, to the extent that literacy is now generally regarded as a highly individualized, reflexive, meaning-making response to an authored stimulus (a text) which can be authored and read in a number of different modalities - some of them electronic in nature. In effect, literacy skills are now perceived to be those tools and stratagems developed by an individual in order to make sense, and put within a social context, the multiple sourced print, audio, visual, spatial and inter-related cultural products that are so prolific in the media-saturated socio-cultural environment of our contemporary Western civilisation: (see for example the work of educational theorists such as Cope & Kalantzis 2000; Luke et al, 2003; Snyder 1996; and Gee 2000. It stands to reason that if the literacy demands upon citizens of the 21st century are significantly different from those of the past, then the educational priorities for literacy educators may well be profoundly different as well. This study therefore examines how a select group of literacy educators perceive their role in providing and developing a meaningful literacy curriculum that addresses the effect these new technologies are having upon the practice of reading and writing amongst their students. Such a shift in pedagogical paradigm will inevitably be reflected in the ways in which teachers desire to, or do already successfully embed new technologies into the daily machinations of their classroom practice. Ultimately, this study is intended to provide a snapshot of the beliefs and practices of a small group of literacy educators regarding the embedding of new technologies into their curriculum development and implementation. While such a narrowly centred study cannot c1aim to be indicative of the beliefs and practices of all teachers operating in all schools of the state, nonetheless it does provide a complex and multifaceted perspective of the situation at a micro-sociological level.