About
Professor Peter Freebody-
Peter Freebody is Professorial Research Fellow whose research and teaching interests are literacy education, educational disadvantage, classroom interaction and quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Teaching and learning in the New Life Sciences
Summary
There is a need to maintain literacy skills across the school years as students encounter the specialised literacy demands of each discipline area. Research on this topic, however, and its interface with evolving information / communication technologies (ICTs), is sparse. The proposed research – a three-year observation and intervention program –expands on current notions of literacy education by capitalising on the relatively rapid emergence of a curricular ‘meta-discipline’ – the ‘New Life Sciences’ –that is distinctively dependent for its knowledge base on ICTs, for its representation systems on multimodal texts, and for its pedagogies on exploration and experimentation. There is little research that has focused explicitly on interventions in pedagogical processes aimed at improving learning in multimodal settings. This research aims to close this gap.
Supervisor(s)
Research Location
Program Type
N/A
Synopsis
This project capitalises on a ‘natural experiment’ by focusing the considerations of the above mentioned project on the newly-emerging meta-discipline, referred to here as the New Life Sciences (NLS). Investments put into literacy in early years of schooling should be complemented by persistent development of literacy skills as new curriculum and technologies are encountered in the middle and senior school. These disciplinary and technological innovations have implications for learning particularly in the meta-discipline; the New Life Sciences, where much knowledge is effectively taught only via digital technologies, and represented in symbolic forms other than, or in conjunction with language. The implications for the labour market and international competitiveness of Australian Science and technology education currency, in the NLS context, call for a program of re-theorisation, collaborative trialing, and intervention.
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Keywords
Education, teaching, learning, life sciences, literacy, pedogogy, curriculum
Opportunity ID
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is: 491
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