Valuing students' diverse language and cultural backgrounds: A multiliteracies project in a remote Indigenous community

This chapter considers understandings of student diversity as articulated in the Australian Curriculum documents, designs of meaning for written and visual text, and the different sorts of pedagogy we introduced for different stages of a multiliteracies project. I provide an example of how Miss Lizzy, an early career teacher, and I worked with a remote Indigenous community in the Torres Strait, Far North Queensland, to plan and teach a unit of work that would develop students’ English and History knowledge. I conclude by highlighting the usefulness of a wide, but not vague, multiliteracies approach, and the importance of developing an explicit grammar for written and visual text for meeting the literacy learning needs of diverse student groups as they study English and History. Chapter foci • multiliteracies pedagogy • working with genre • knowledge about language • grammar for visual text • grammar for written text • pedagogies for respecting diversity