The Critical Heart of Multiliteracies: Four Resources, Multimodal Texts and Classroom Practice

This chapter reports and discusses one multiliteracies, longer-term project in a primary classroom and ways in which a 'designs for learning' framework (Kalantzis & Cope, 2004) reshaped its pedagogy. In addition to rethinking literacy education, a critique of the curriculum and pedagogy is also timely - and inevitable. Rapid and ongoing developments in technologies and ways of exchanging knowledge require a significant shift to the way in which literacy is viewed, especially as previously defined genres have their boundaries stretched to acknowledge new hybrid multimodal text forms. Such conditions displace much of the work of traditional literacy education