Heather Lotherington – författare

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012!

Based on case studies from public schools in Toronto, Canada, this book chronicles an inspiring five-year journey to develop thinking about and teaching literacy for the 21st century. The research, which was classroom-based and developed by public school teachers in collaboration with university researchers, was stimulated by an ethnographic study at Joyce Public School to track children learning to read in an era of multiliteracies.

Following the kindergarteners’ interest in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Lotherington asked the principal: What would Goldilocks look like, retold through the eyes of the children? The resulting classroom experiment to transform learning to read a storybook into multimodal collaborative story-telling sparked the development of an award-winning school-university learning community dedicated to the development of multimodal literacies in the culturally diverse, urban classroom.

Pedagogy of Multiliteracies tells the evolving story of teachers’ trial-and-error interventions to engage children in multiple modes of expression involving structured play with contemporary media. Using the complex texts created, the teachers carve spaces to welcome the voices of children and the languages of the community into the English-medium classroom.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012!

Based on case studies from public schools in Toronto, Canada, this book chronicles an inspiring five-year journey to develop thinking about and teaching literacy for the 21st century. The research, which was classroom-based and developed by public school teachers in collaboration with university researchers, was stimulated by an ethnographic study at Joyce Public School to track children learning to read in an era of multiliteracies.

Following the kindergarteners’ interest in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Lotherington asked the principal: What would Goldilocks look like, retold through the eyes of the children? The resulting classroom experiment to transform learning to read a storybook into multimodal collaborative story-telling sparked the development of an award-winning school-university learning community dedicated to the development of multimodal literacies in the culturally diverse, urban classroom.

Pedagogy of Multiliteracies tells the evolving story of teachers’ trial-and-error interventions to engage children in multiple modes of expression involving structured play with contemporary media. Using the complex texts created, the teachers carve spaces to welcome the voices of children and the languages of the community into the English-medium classroom.

This book documents a collaborative action research project in one school where researchers and practitioners worked together to develop multimodal literacies and pedagogies for diverse, multilingual elementary classrooms. Following chronologically from Lotherington’s Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (2011), this volume picks up after teachers and researchers have learned how to work efficiently as a learning community to offer project-based learning approaches. This edited collection relates how teachers and students of different grade levels, language backgrounds, and abilities developed a shared agenda and created a framework for effective and inclusive practices. Contributors demonstrate that collaboration, creative pedagogical solutions and innovative project-based learning are all essential parts of learning and teaching socially appropriate and responsive literacies in a multimodal, superdiverse world.