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Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 Volume 32, Issue 1, 2009, pp 126–136

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Journal: JRIR No. of pages: 11

CE: Blackwell PE: Kiran/prasath

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2008.01385.x

The multimodal redesign of school texts Christopher Walsh

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Deakin University, Australia

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Multiliteracies-related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner-research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with year 8 students in New York City’s Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multimodal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese-American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip-hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students’ artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational Web sites using HTML and Flash. It argues the redesigned Web sites are a new set of multimodal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.

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The technological landscape of the 21st century has changed and the medium of text is no longer the most significant cultural tool deployed to shape our social attitudes and beliefs. We are living in a time characterised by multimodality (Jewitt, 2008) and new media (Lemke, 2005). In education there is an obligation to accept the pressing relevance of the new possibilities for, and constraints on, representation and communication. Adolescent students, unlike many of their teachers, possess a creativity that allows them to constantly reconfigure the representational and communicational resources of multiple modes through multimodal design (Walsh, 2007). Yet, classrooms still remain primarily entrenched in print literacy pedagogies. Few spaces exist in schools where multiliteracies curricula are enacted, requiring students to critically read/view and design both print and digital texts, harnessing the multiplicity of semiotic systems. This article describes practitioner-research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Comber, 1999) where I enacted a multiliteracies curriculum (The New London Group, 1996; Walsh, 2006) that required students to engage in a discourse analysis of school and media texts and then re-represent their literacy learning through multimodal design (Albright, Purohit & Walsh, 2006a; Walsh, 2007, 2008). As a teacher practitioner working in the new media age (Kress, 2003), I integrated Internet communication technologies with my literacy instruction (Albright, Purohit & Walsh, 2002, 2006b; Kamler & Comber, 2005;

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Dispatch: 11.11.08

r United Kingdom Literacy Association 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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THE MULTIMODAL REDESIGN OF SCHOOL TEXTS

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Lankshear, Snyder & Green, 2000; Marsh, 2005; Snyder & Beavis, 2004) because I understood the primacy of the medium of text was being increasingly displaced by digital, screen-based texts. I first outline the multiliteracies curriculum that provided a new critical framework, helping me cope with the complexity of digital texts and their access, production and distribution. I then illustrate and discuss incorporating digital technologies into the curriculum, through a school–museum partnership, that provided spaces where students could interact, socialise and learn in both the real and virtual world (Beavis & Charles, 2005; Lam, 2006; Marsh, 2003; Sefton-Green, 2006). I argue that students engaging in the critique and redesign of school texts through multimodal design provides them with a new set of multimodal literacy practices to talk back to and challenge racist and exclusionary discourses around immigration to the United States or other discourses they find problematic.

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This project draws on a critical practitioner-research (Carr & Kemmis, 1985) study of adolescents’ literacy practices in a humanities class that sought to incorporate the theory of multimodality within a multiliteracies curriculum. In this study, I specifically focused teaching and instruction on multimodality where students analysed various modes of expression and communication from text to image, from sound to interactivity and networking related to their life worlds. Four components of multiliteracies pedagogy were enacted predicated on the notion of design (The New London Group, 1996): Situated Practice, which drew on students’ experience of meaning-making in life worlds; Overt Instruction, through which students were taught an explicit metalanguage of Design; Critical Framing, where students interpreted the social context and purpose of Designs of meaning across various print and digital texts; and Transformed Practice, where students emerged as designers or meaning-makers drawing on their proficiency orchestrating multiple semiotic modes. I capitalised on Situated Practice by focusing on Chinese immigration to the United States because most of my students were first and second-generation Chinese immigrants. Thus, the curriculum itself was based on the world of students’ designed and designing experiences because they were engaged in meaningful and relevant literacy practices related to their sociocultural context. Through Overt Instruction, I explicitly addressed aspects of design by exploring how thematic links in continuous printed texts (novels, short stories) are presented through repetitions of words, allusions, and references. Using picture books and digital texts, I also modelled how these links were made through images, colour, shape, sound and page layout (Bearne, 2005). My Overt Instruction required the development of, and teaching to students – a metalanguage – to describe and evaluate meanings created by the relationships between image and word, or between images themselves (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Through Critical Framing, I encouraged students to think about how people from diverse backgrounds might interpret images, video or Web pages in relation to accompanying text, narration or sound (Lemke, 2005). Students engaged in Transformed Practice by using what they had learned in the multiliteracies curriculum to reconstruct texts and knowledge practices in new ways and in different contexts. Their multimodal design and redesign of school texts, was an orientation to literacy that encompassed the idea of productive power (Janks, 2000); that is, the ability to harness the multiplicity of semiotic systems across diverse cultural

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locations to challenge and change existing discourses. The multiliteracies curriculum created a space in the classroom that recognised the importance of students’ creativity and ability to generate an infinite number of new meanings across various domestic and institutional contexts through multimodal design. Within the curriculum, I provided students with explicit instruction on two tasks they performed simultaneously. First, they learned how to use and select from all the available semiotic resources for representation. Second, they combined and recombine these resources to create possibilities for transformation and reconstruction by redesigning school texts.

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This 1 year research project, ‘Movin’ On: Stories of Immigration’, sought to maximise students’ multimodal design and redesign of school texts through a school–museum collaboration. The project with The Dia Center for the Arts, a local museum committed to fostering communication about contemporary artists, provided an opportunity for students to experience a variety of art forms, particularly large-scale installations that incorporated multimodal elements of space, moving images, sound and narration. There were 25 student participants who were first and second-generation Chinese immigrants, aged 12–13 years. They were selected because they comprised one of my two humanities classes in a small academy of technology located in New York City’s Chinatown. As an indicator of the socio-economic status of the school’s 180 students, 92% received free or reduced-price lunch. Our small middle school with 180 students and 10 teachers experimented with block scheduling, subject integration across grades and disciplines, portfolio-based assessment, student advisories and a number of partnerships with museums and cultural and community organisations. It is important to note that in this unique school setting, I was allowed greater professional autonomy than is commonplace, and I was encouraged to engage in practitioner-research. I worked with digital artist Yael Kanarek and The Dia Center’s Education Associate to collaboratively design a Web-based research project related to our humanities curriculum and our shared belief that all children have ‘virtual schoolbags’ (Thompson, 2002). I participated in six teacher-training seminars to learn about the museum’s exhibits and engage in the production of various types of artwork. The students made a series of concentrated visits to the gallery’s installations lead by trained guides and Kanarek – offering them the unique experience of observing art over time. Kanarek also visited our classroom on 10 separate occasions to provide us with art history and production workshops. Inspired by the students’ engagement with a specific Web project at the museum, we designed our project and then curated an exhibition of students’ digital art that used HTML and Flash design technologies to insert political satire cartoons about Chinese immigration into existing academic Web sites. The class modelled their story structures on Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s Zombie & Mummy project, created for Dia’s series of online artist Web projects.1 The project was designed into three distinct phases, each coinciding with literacy practices and content introduced in the multiliteracies curriculum as well as visits to the museum and Kanarek’s classroom art and design workshops. Phase 1: Introducing a multiliteracies curriculum. The multiliteracies curriculum required students to engage in critical literacy practices initially through Situated Practices, Overt Instruction and Critical Framing around multimodal texts.

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1. Situated Practice: I designed the curriculum in ways that required students to research Chinese immigration, initially through visuals. This was an attempt to change both the text and experience of schooling by moving away from relying on the history textbook, while making teaching and learning relevant both to students’ lifeworlds and our location in Chinatown. At this time, I first met with Kanarek and discussed my unit on Chinese Immigration and we began to develop a hands-on project that was interwoven with the class curriculum and students’ experiences visiting the museum. 2. Overt Instruction: Students received instruction in the reading of images through the grammar of visual design, and specifically the significance of participants/ circumstances, vectors, colour, perspective, and framing. With this metalanguage of visual grammar, students were better able to analyze visual texts. I labelled this a ‘toolbox’ (Albright, Walsh & Purohit, 2007) of discourse analytic strategies derived from Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) Grammar of Visual Design. Using the toolbox, we collectively analysed two visual texts around Chinese Immigration to the United States. Then students worked in groups to analyse four additional texts using the metalanguage to uncover racist and exclusionary discourses in primary history texts (advertisements and political cartoons). The first visual we analysed at was The Magic Washer,2 a soap advertisement from the late 1800s featuring ‘Uncle Sam’, an iconic symbol of the United States’ government, kicking a Chinese immigrant, drawn to look more like a monster than human. The bottom of the poster reads ‘The Chinese Must Go’, referring to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the pervasive anti-Chinese prejudice of the time. Additional visuals included Workingman Party tickets and cartoons from a variety of US newspapers. Kanarek, drawing on the work from the curriculum initiated similar activities with the students at the museum where the visually analysed different artworks and installations. She also provided Overt Instruction with HTML and Flash in workshops after school. Together at the museum, we spent time experiencing, reflecting on and engaging with installations. One multiprojection video installation in particular, Knots1Surfaces3 by Diana Thater, challenged what many students had previously perceived visual art to be, sketches and paintings. For the first time, many students came to understand that art could also be digital-incorporating multiple semiotic modes. 3. Critical Framing: As I taught semiotic strategies, students became more adept at viewing/reading and discussing/debating both the representations before them, and the ideologies underlying them. This assisted them to interpret the social context and purpose of the texts’ designs of meaning. When viewing/reading visual texts about or referring to Chinese Immigration in the late 1880s, students developed intertextual critiques of ideology construction about race and patriotism through binarisms of good/evil, civilized/savage and clean/unclean. They did this through a multimodal analysis of the images that called on the resources in the metalanguage of visual grammars. Afterwards, students put together visual displays explaining these intertextual connections in a classroom installation. These displays were powerful critiques portraying students’ understandings of the racist ideologies at work during that time period. Through Critical Framing, students were pushed to question the cultural ideology out of which they read and write (Gilbert, 1994; McCormick, 1994). I based this aspect of the multiliteracies curriculum on critical pedagogy’s positive thesis that is based on the ‘assumption that if the ‘text’ and experience of schooling are changed (i.e., elimination of racism, sexism, classism), then students lives and, hence civil society will be changed for the better’ (Luke, 2002, p. 27).

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Phase 2: Discourse analysis of print-based school texts: In the second phase of the study, inquiry into disciplinary structures was also achieved through the Overt Instruction of similar critical semiotic perspectives on print texts. Central to this was teaching students how to uncover gaps and silences in texts as a form of critical analysis when reading history books (Peim, 1993). Students analysed these texts drawing on a similar toolbox of critical semiotic practices including how texts constructed authority, used register and modality, their degree of nominalisation and use of passive voice to hide agency. As they read different history texts they looked for excerpts that referred to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and other exclusionary legislation from US History (The Page Law, The AntiCoolie Tax, The Scott Act and so on), uncovering gaps in these texts around Chinese immigration. The first set of materials used in the study was three popular US history texts. Each text offered information about the Chinese Exclusion Act, but the offer varied significantly. In one 800-page text, it appeared only on a timeline in the margins. Another text clearly stated that the Act was passed as a result of the efforts of ‘American racists’ or ‘white working men’ (Hakim, 1994). In their intertextual critique of these texts, students worked to determine the author positionings of these texts through the language/ grammar used, and through the visuals used to anchor the print sections. Thus, instead of learning about Chinese immigration through a timeline of events from one history text, students looked at this history as it is constructed through text and discourse across various print and digital media. In this example, students were learning strategies for analysing and approaching texts by analysing the construction of different views of history through the narratives in the texts and through a multimodal analysis of visuals from advertisements and newspapers. At the Dia Center, students were viewing Rosemaire Trokel’s video projection exhibit entitled Spleen,4 which explores and disrupts common assumptions of gender roles. In discussion and group interviews, students discussed how the video projections, installation space and music worked together to provoke what they termed ‘scary emotions’ and ‘uncomfortable feelings’. An understanding that texts are not neutral and authors/artists use different modalities to position/persuade/affect reader/viewers, along with the metalanguage of visual grammars, helped them approach, view and critique artworks. Using similar strategies to those learned in the multiliteracies curriculum, they analysed how Spleen disrupted boundaries and startled viewers, pushing them to question normative notions of identity. Phase 3: The redesign of school texts: Students addressed the gaps and silences they uncovered through their intertextual reading practices by rewriting history textbook chapters about Chinese immigration. They considered class readings and texts discovered through their individual research. They responded to gaps and silences in these texts, to what they conveyed about racist ideologies and violence directed at Chinese immigrants. They creatively integrated photos, images, typographic conventions and print texts to design paper chapters and Web sites that were critical of dominant representations of the Chinese immigration experience immigrating to and living in the United States. This work offers an example of how students took what they learned from working with school texts and particular ways of thinking about social history, and put that learning to work in a new Web-based context through multimodal design. One group of students, drawing on their curricular work and experiences at the museum, independently designed Beyond Chinatown: The Chinese neighbours you do not know5 as part of the ThinkQuest Challenge run by the New York City Public Library. The Web site, in English and Chinese, chronicles the discrimination and hardship the Chinese faced from when they

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first arrived in America. Their multimodal Web design is sophisticated, starting with a flash movie and music that positions the reader through the use of the word ‘beyond’ as an acronym: [b]etrayal, [e]xotic, [y]ellow, [o]pression, and [n]eglect. The Web design offers readers a multimodal barrage, drawing them into the Web site with a critical positioning that challenges textual authority across a variety of text types. Students’ Web site design incorporated topics covered in the curriculum, including ‘Golden Mountain’ and discrimination and violence against the Chinese. Interestingly, their design moves beyond their humanities curriculum, presenting legal and individual examples of Chinese resistance to racism and exclusion (The People v. Hall, 1854; Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 1886; Pun Chi, and others), the role of the Chinese in World War II, and information about Chinatowns and the Chinese today. Through a centrally located link – in bold red – readers/viewers are directed to a ‘hall of offenders’. Here actors are strongly criticized for promoting racism and sexualized stereotypes of Asians. Working with Karanek, students explored a series of four of Dia’s artists’ projects for the Web. Resonating well with students’ lifeworlds, the projects explore the aesthetic and conceptual potentials of this medium in much the same way I was exploring multimodal texts with students in the curriculum. Students enjoyed the Zombie and Mummy6 work that chronicles the struggles and adventures of two characters – Zombie and Mummy – through 20 gothic and hip-hop weekly comic strips featuring the characters attempting to accomplish something such as starting a hip-hop band, visiting the zoo, or learning a programming language. The cartoons chronicle how their ventures are thwarted by a problem caused by one character, then the other; and then the final frame illustrates a solution. Capitalising on the students’ enthusiasm for the work, we asked them if they would like to design something similar drawing on the work we completed around Chinese immigration and about their families’ experiences of immigration. They liked the idea and Karanek worked with students on the visual aspects of storyboarding their cartoons while I worked with them on the genre of satirical cartoons. In what follows, I give some sense of the dedicated ways the students worked to challenge racist discourses and gaps and silences in their history text through cartooning, and then the multimodal redesign of school texts. In particular, I analyse how two students, Lisa and Jack, confronted questions of identity and immigrant identity by engaging in the critique and redesign. This practice provided them with a new set of multimodal literacy practices to talk back to and challenge exclusionary discourses around immigration to the United States and is an example of their Transformed Practice as a result of their participation in a multiliteracies curriculum.

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Cartoons talking back to racism and exclusion Over 2 weeks, working with Karanek and in peer groups; students discussed their ideas for the cartoons, connections to the curriculum and the meaning of political satire. They drafted the story lines and cartoons, sought feedback, then integrated the feedback and worked on their final cartoons on storyboards. Student storyboards were then scanned at a high resolution and turned into individual .gif files to be later inserted into academic Web sites about Chinese Immigration. r United Kingdom Literacy Association 2009

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Figure 1. http://www.diaart.org/prg/educat/studentexhib2002-03/lisa.htm

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Figure 2. Lisa’s redesign of the school text, ‘The Last Spike is Driven’ at http://www.diacenter.org/prg/ educat/studentexhib2002-03/lisa.htm

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‘The Many Miles’7 by Lisa (Figure 1), tells a story of a Chinese man who sees an advertisement in China promising work on the intercontinental railroad. Her narrative, unlike her history textbook, tells of the many Chinese who died on the voyage to the United States, of starvation and disease, the dangers of working on the railroad and the anti-Chinese riots in California. Near the end, the narrative goes years into the future, perhaps offering a critique of her classmates or peers in the community who may take for granted the sacrifices family members are often forced to make when they immigrate. Lisa writes, ‘but the generations don’t behave for what get and ‘please pay attention in class’. Lisa’s cartoon is a telling response to gaps and silences she uncovered through her intertextual discourse analytic work in the curriculum. On interview she explained how history texts generally hide what really happened and give a ‘water-downed’ version of the truth. From the intertextual reading activity Lisa conducted with her peers, she came to realise authors position their readers differently and that no text is neutral. With that understanding, she found an academic text online that also discussed Chinese Immigration to the United States. Using the FLASH and HTML coding literacy practices she learned from Karanek, she inserted her political satire cartoon into the Web site (Figure 2) and it was re-uploaded online as part of the curated exhibition thereby disrupting and shifting the original author’s reading intended textual positioning. Her redesign of the academic text mirrors Epenschied’s Zombie & Mummy project. It is centred in the middle of the Web page and readers/viewers need to interact with the scroll bar to move the cartoon from one frame to the next.

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Figure 3. http://www.diaart.org/prg/educat/studentexhib2002-03/galleryJlo.htm

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Figure 4. http://www.diacenter.org/prg/educat/studentexhib2002-03/galleryJlo.htm

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‘Not a Chinaman’s chance’,8 by Jack (Figure 3), narrates the story of Lao who hears rumours of Gum San (Golden Mountain) from his friend. ‘I’m going to be rich!’ he exclaims to his family as he quickly sells off everything he has to buy a ticket to a foreign land. A deceived Lao ignores the dangers that lie ahead. He is convinced he will get rich. Upon arrival in California, he hears ‘not a Chinaman’s chance’, yet Lao does not give up. After arduous manual labour Lao realises there never was a Gum San and he asks himself, why did I leave China? Jack’s cartoon works to interrupt the all too common success stories of immigration rampant in US history textbooks that tend to cover up the hardships, discrimination and racism nonnorthern European immigrants faced and still experience. For the exhibition, he also redesigned a school text (Figure 4) through Flash and HTML coding and reuploaded it. Both students were engaged in multimodal design that challenges students’ usually taken for granted acceptance of textual authority. This design requirement of the research project disrupted text, hypertext, image and racist discourses around Chinese immigration as the reader/viewer/user has to focus and move his/her mouse to scroll through the cartoon in relation to the other textual elements on the screen. A total of 25 students drew cartoons and selected the Web site they wanted to disrupt and created their redesigned school texts as Web sites that were curated for Movin on: Stories of immigration and uploaded into an ongoing online exhibition9 on the Dia Center’s servers. Jack and Lisa’s design of their cartoons, within the space created by the multiliteracies curriculum and school–museum collaboration, permits them to exercise agency in their remaking and design that is often unavailable or forced in schools. Each cartoon is a

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design that moves beyond critique because it is not a distanced analytical understanding, but what I believe is a resource in setting an agenda of future aims (Kress, 2000). By this I mean, each draws on his/her learning experiences from the collaboration and their competence in the use of multiple semiotic resources – with a highly developed understanding of the communicational potentials of these resources – to make a political and ideological statement they know will be disseminated through the online curated exhibit. In this sense, the research project gave the students the critical analytic tools with which to assess the sociocultural and political consequences of a range of print and media texts as well as those of technological change essential for equitable participation in social, economic and cultural life.

Discussion

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Students’ disruptive redesign of school texts as transformed practice

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The Movin On: Stories of immigration exhibit is an example of students’ in-school digital literacies in which they draw on discourse analytic and intertextual reading practices for the purpose of what the New London Group (1996) calls Transformed Practice. The redesign reflected the textual work students had done with language, discourse and visual techniques in the humanities classroom and at the museum. It also reflected their specific production of artwork to focus attention on questions of identity and immigrant identities around Chinese immigration through the multimodal redesign of school texts. Important in students’ redesign is how multiliteracies as a theoretical framework connects the concept of redesign to transformed practice. Students engage in a ‘transfer in meaning making practice, which puts the transformed meaning (the Redesigned) to work in other contexts or cultural sites’ (The New London Group, 1996, p. 35). They made perceptive use of the available designs they had learned from working with school and art texts, they called on particular ways of thinking about social history and they explored the transformative power of art. More remarkable is that they integrated these practices: they put them to work through multimodal design that showcased their imagination and creativity. This transcends the usual measure of students’ work because it highlights their design of various texts that encompassed a variety of spoken, written, audio and visual discourses. This practitioner-research draws attention to the significance of creating pedagogical spaces in partnership with cultural and community institutions. In these spaces, young people can use their creativity – realised as multimodal design – to disrupt prominent and ideological discourses embedded in school texts and in their lived experience. These new pedagogical spaces allow youth to design cultural productions that are in opposition to much of the current discourse on adolescence. This discourse is best described as emblematic of modernity, as colonial, as gendered, and as administrative (Lesko, 2001) and is often used to maintain traditional print-based literacy practices. Of critical importance is how this study provides an example of how a practitionerresearcher moves multiliteracies theory into practice. The intention of the research, however, is not to simply celebrate my own practice, rather present an example of how teachers can frame similar research within their individual contexts. I engineered a redesign of my traditional print-based curriculum and supported this endeavour through a sustained school–museum partnership. My ongoing aim was to create pedagogical spaces within the curriculum that urged students to resist taking up discourses, through literacy practices, they found undesirable. This required I situate the learning in a context relevant

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to their lifeworlds while simultaneously providing them with Overt Instruction and experience with a range of semiotic resources that empower them to talk back to texts they find problematic – if they choose to do so. This new set of literacy practices, which works to include and put to work their out-of-school digital literacy practices, also helps them re-represent curricular knowledge in sophisticated and eloquent ways. Many of my students were second-language learners and would have struggled to produce such provocative and disruptive work through traditional print literacy practices. There are still many challenges this sort of work presents educators and pre- and inservice teacher institutions who find themselves struggling amid the sophisticated technologies that make print literacy countable and accountable in schools. But practitioner-research nature of this study sets it apart from other research studies that promote multiliteracies inspired work. The research design was situated and powerful in creating a space within the classroom for students to critically engage with school and media texts through critical, intertextual and multimodal design literacy practices. I was a teacher working within a framework where I followed the State and city guidelines and aligned our multiliteracies curriculum with department of education’s standards. I encouraged the students to take up new literacy practices and examine their possibilities for re-representing curricular knowledge while simultaneously helping them understand they can put their out-of-school literacy practices to use to contest discourses at odds with their lived experience and lifeworlds. This is essentially an example of not domesticating new literacies, but situating pedagogical practice in such a way that it enfranchises a community of learners through critique and social analysis alongside the production of more traditional print-based literacy practices.

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http://www.diacenter.org/webproj/index.html http://encarta.msn.com/media_461520862_1741500823_-1_1/the_magic_washer.html http://www.diachelsea.org/exhibs/thater/knots/ http://www.diachelsea.org/exhibs/trockel/ http://www.geocities.com/mashicooz/hakim_rewrite.html http://www.zombie-and-mummy.org/ http://www.diacenter.org/prg/educat/studentexhib2002-03/lisa.htm http://www.diacenter.org/prg/educat/studentexhib2002-03/galleryJlo.htm http://www.diacenter.org/prg/educat/studentexhib2002-03/index.htm

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

References

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Albright, J., Purohit, K. & Walsh, C.S. (2002). Louise Rosenblatt seeks [email protected] for LTR: Using chat rooms in interdisciplinary middle school classrooms. Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, 45(8), 692–705. Albright, J., Purohit, K. & Walsh, C.S. (2006a). Hybridity, globalisation, and literacy education in the context of New York City’s Chinatown. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 1(4), 221–242. Albright, J., Purohit, K. & Walsh, C.S. (2006b). Multimodal reading and design in cross-disciplinary curriculum theorising. In W.D. Bokhorst-Heng, M.D. Osborne & K. Lee (Eds.), Redesigning pedagogy: Reflections on theory and praxis. (pp. 3–19). Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers. Albright, J., Walsh, C.S. & Purohit, K. (2007). Towards a theory of practice: Critical transdisciplinary multiliteracies. In D.M. McInerney, S. Van Etten & M. Dowson (Eds.), Standards in education. (pp. 93–119). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. r United Kingdom Literacy Association 2009

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Received 5 May 2008; revised version received 31 August 2008. Address for correspondence: Christopher Walsh, Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Burwood Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood Victoria 3125, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] r United Kingdom Literacy Association 2009

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Author Query Form _______________________________________________________ Journal Article

JRIR 1385

_______________________________________________________ Dear Author, During the copy-editing of your paper, the following queries arose. Please respond to these by marking up your proofs with the necessary changes/additions. Please write your answers clearly on the query sheet if there is insufficient space on the page proofs. If returning the proof by fax do not write too close to the paper's edge. Please remember that illegible mark-ups may delay publication. Query No.

Description AQ: Please confirm the change of Jewit to Jewitt as per the reference list for the reference Jewitt (2008).

Q1 AQ: Snyder & Beavis, 2004 has not been included in the list, please include and supply publication details.

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5

AQ: Please confirm the change of year from 2007 to 2005 as per the reference list for the reference Beavis & Charles (2005).

AQ: Please confirm the change of Kremmis to Kemmis as per the reference list for the reference Carr & Kemmis (1985).

AQ: Please confirm the change of Leeuween to Leeuwen as per the reference list for the reference Kress & van Leeuwen (1996).

AQ: Luke (2002) has not been included in the list, please include and supply publication details.

Q6 AQ: Please confirm the change of year from 2000 to 1994 as per the reference list for the reference Hakim (1994).

Q7 AQ: Hall (1854) has not been included in the list, please include and supply publication details.

Q8 AQ: Hopkins (1886) has not been included in the list, please include and supply publication details.

Q9 AQ: Please cite Snyder (1997) in the text or delete from the list.

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Q11

Please note : Figures 1 and 3 are of poor quality. Please supply good quality figures.

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