Using Constructive Alignment to Support Metaliteracy in International Classrooms

Abstract

This paper discusses strategies for promoting literacy and metaliteracy development in international and multicultural classrooms. Drawing on the first author’s observational research and the second author’s expertise in metaliteracy, we present a case study of international postgraduate students in an interdisciplinary department. The authors synthesize their different areas of work to describe how a fusion of metaliteracy, constructive alignment, and learning oriented assessments (LOA) facilitates student engagement with theories of knowledge organization and extensible markup language (XML) data-encoding standards. Our discussion describes curriculum design and redesign strategies and contextualizes observations about student success. The authors’ observations provide a basis for proposing methods for using metaliteracy to implement constructive alignment and LOA methods for promoting collaborative and truly diverse learning.