learner differences and the importance of engagement,
we have to be able to change the balance of command and responsibility.
That is to join with learners in achieving goals and
setting pathways to the goal, allowing learners to feel that
they have a voice in responding to what's being learned and
knowing how they themselves can proceed and want to proceed.
>> Thinking of an example now of how these differences play out differently in
the literacy classroom, symbolic differences, how they play out.
So here's one historical model,
all the kids had the generic readers which they had.
Every kid had the same reader.
And in that reader was the idealized family with the mother and
the father and the boy and the girl in an ideally affluent
universe where everyone's happy and everything's fun.
And the assumption is that that's what every family is.
Okay so that's how you don't deal with symbolic differences amongst
the learners in the classroom.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples now of dealing with those symbolic
differences.
The first example is from a school in Mexico.
This is Mario Lopez-Gopar, some work that he did,
and there is this indigenous cloak which
has a whole pile of narrative symbolic religious meanings that goes with it.
Remember the idea of communities commitment, so
what kind of culture commitments.
Remember the idea of ethnos,
what types of ethnic culturural identity are there in this community.
And to bring that into the community, what he got the students
to do was to label the symbolic elements on a piece of clothing.
So what's multimodal about it?
Well it's actually something,
which in our definition is part of this gestural universe which includes fashion.
It involves a whole lot of visual imagery, iconic imagery.
It involves narratives,
telling the stories that go with it in order to explain what it means.
So, what these teachers are doing is they're bringing in symbolic differences
in which students are immersed into the classroom, into profound kinds of ways.
That's very different from the funny old basal readers
where you were just given something which is this idealized reading text.
And another kind of multi mobile example,
this is by Karen Martin and she is an indigenous person of Australia,
who is from Stradbroke Island, which is off Queensland, Australia.
And this is a work of art, which was done in relation to a set of
learnings in the classroom and with the kids.
Which is also a kind of a map, a symbolic map, a totemic map,
a map of indigenous culture, a map of the land, all of those things all at once.
So it's about spice and its image and its narrative, and
this is to bring something in from the students' own experience,
the indigenous students' own experience on Stradbroke Island.
So these are some examples of incorporating or attending to and
dialoguing with symbolic differences in the classroom.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
