Multiliteracies theory is part of a growing and evolving body of research tangled up with multiple, intersecting fields: literacies, technologies, pedagogies, socio-materiality, and semiotics, to name a few. It is a theory that has been taken up largely in the professional practice of teacher education but is rapidly emerging as a useful way to think through the complexities of practice in multiple professions such as medical education, or engineering. As learning has come to be understood and framed in ways that acknowledge the temporal, spatial, material, and embodied layers of understanding, practice-based professions are finding ways to investigate and support knowing in practice.
Article
Multiliteracies in Professional Education
Kathryn Hibbert, Mary Ott, Christopher Eaton, and Lin Sun
Article
Traditions, Research, and Practice Supporting Academically Productive Classroom Discourse
Jie Park, Sarah Michaels, Renee Affolter, and Catherine O'Connor
This article focuses on both research and practice relating to academically productive classroom discourse. We seek to “expand the conversation” to include newcomers to the field of classroom talk, as well as practitioners and youth researchers who want to contribute to knowledge building in this area. We first explore a variety of traditions, questions, and methods that have been prominent in work on classroom talk. We also summarize some key findings that have emerged over the past several decades:
• Finding 1: Certain kinds of talk promote robust learning for ALL students.
• Finding 2: The field lacks shared conceptualizations of what productive talk is and how best to characterize it.
• Finding 3: Dialogic discourse is exceedingly rare in classrooms, at all grade levels and across all domains.
• Finding 4: A helpful way forward: conceptualizing talk moves as tools.
Following the presentation of each research finding we provide a set of commentaries—explicating and in some cases problematizing the findings. Finally, we provide some promising approaches that presume cultural and linguistic assets among both students and teachers, including curricular programs, teacher education, professional development programs, teacher research, and intergenerational communities of inquiry. In all of this, we try to make our own assumptions, traditions, and governing gazes explicit, as a multi-generational and multi-role group of authors, to encourage greater transparency among all who work in this important and potentially transformative field of study.
