Investigating multiple literacies: Wadestown Kindergarten COI

Abstract

Since 2002, the Centre of Innovation (COI) research programme, funded by the Ministry of Education, has enabled teachers to work with researchers to document and enhance their innovative approaches to learning and teaching within their early childhood settings. Wadestown Kindergarten became one of the six designated COIs in round three of the programme in 2006. This article discusses the kindergarten's focus on multiple literacies and its role in communicative competence and meaning making. It draws on case study documentation from two children, whose examples illustrate how literacies interact and support each other, and the affordances offered by different literacies or what different literacies enabled these children to do. Kindergarten parents have been involved in contributing to and interpreting pedagogical documentation and as members of the COI research team. This article also discusses how parent input has contributed to the analysis and generated challenges for ongoing practice. Wadestown Kindergarten is a two-teacher sessional kindergarten with 30 four-year-olds attending in the morning, five sessions a week, and 30 three-year-olds attending in the afternoon, three sessions a week. The kindergarten is nestled in the small community of Wadestown, close to Wellington city. Kindergarten families are predominantly from a high socioeconomic background. The kindergarten's programme is regarded as special for its exploration of multiple literacies within the use of a project approach. Partnership with parents, wha nau, and community is another strong feature. Parents and community are regularly involved in projects, assessment, activities, special events, and daily sessions. There is a well supported roster of parent helpers and family members who regularly opt to stay at the kindergarten during sessions. Focus on multiple literacies Wadestown Kindergarten's focus on multiple literacies is on literacies as ways of conceptualising and knowing as well as on literacies as means of communicating. This focus links with the communication strand of Te Whariki (Ministry of Education, 1996), which highlights domains beyond the print-based or verbal-based literacies that have tended to predominate in discourse. Te Whariki refers to a number of possible of expression: art, dance, drama, mathematics, movement, rhythm and music (Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 72). We are investigating how the different modalities children use in communicating and meaning making interact and support each other. What is meant by and what constitutes a is contested. Traditionally, the notion of has been language based and included reading, writing, and verbal literacies. This has been so despite a long history of music, dance, drama, and the visual arts as forms of communication. Kress (2000) points out that a focus on language alone has meant a neglect, an overlooking, even a suppression of the potentials of all the representational and communicational ... and a neglect equally, as a consequence, of the development of theoretical understandings of such modes (p. 157). Now, the term literacy is being used to suggest competence in a wider range of areas. Alongside those who advocate retaining the focus on written and verbal language, it is increasingly being argued that should be seen as plural in nature and as embodying a range of modalities (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Technological developments have stimulated an interest in technological (New London Group, 1996). The capacity to construct texts which draw on a range of modalities, to integrate words with images, sound, music, and movement, has led to a resurgence of interest in different representational and communicational modes, in particular, in relation to digitally afforded multimodality (Hull & Nelson, 2005). The field of studies is also being challenged and expanded to incorporate domains such as media (Marsh, 2006), emotional (Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2005), and critical (Vasquez, 2003). …