Key figures in the field include Cope, Kalantzis wt al, Gunther Kress, Carey Jewitt and Pippa Stein. These authors provided two main frameworks noted in the title and the talk is about examples of these in practice and span over three decades.
In 1980’s Pippa Stein and colleagues became concerned about how English was being taught in the class and the distance to what was happening at this time in the real world with people being arrested etc. They took the children into the community and discussed real issues. At this time politics was banned from classrooms. Student teachers made masks in class from Shakespeare’s the tempest and this enabled them to still discuss issues of their country and what the rulers were doing but using characters from the play.
Second example was in 1994 when students and teachers were able to push boundaries and develop new activities previously not allowed. Students from Johannesburg and New York were asked to make masks of themselves and write letters of their home and use pictures to represent where they came from and these were then swopped with each other. This enabled students to ask questions about each others environment.
Lastly the example is of disaffected students in year 10 who became engaged in using art on cloth to represent their homes and world and they all placed their individual pieces of cloth together into a vast sheet that covered walls. These students had not been engaged in classes before or wanted to do poetry etc .
The speaker talked about a range of projects using multiliteracies and multimodalities. These work when based in context and local and focused around a community of practice.
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