Spatial Literacies, Design Texts, and Emergent Pedagogies in Purposeful Literacy Curriculum

There has recently been an emphasis within literacy studies on both the spatial dimensions of social practices (Leander & Sheehy, 2004 Leander, K. and Sheehy, M. 2004. Spatializing literacy research, New York: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]) and the importance of incorporating design and multiple modes of meaning-making into contemporary understandings of literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000 Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. 2000. Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures, Melbourne, , Australia: Macmillan. [Google Scholar]; New London Group, 1996 New London Group. 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1): 60–92. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Kress (2003) Kress, G. 2003. Literacy in the new media age, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], in particular, has outlined the potential implications of the cultural shift from the dominance of writing based on a logic of time and sequence in time to the dominance of the mode of the image based on a logic of space. However, the widespread redesign of curriculum and pedagogy by classroom teachers to allow students to capitalise on the various affordances of different modes of meaning-making—including the spatial—remains in an emergent stage. We report on a project in which university researchers' expertise in architecture, literacy, and communications enabled two teachers in one school to expand the forms of literacy that primary school children engaged in. Starting from the school community's concerns about an urban renewal project in their neighbourhood, we worked together to develop a curriculum of spatial literacies with real-world goals and outcomes.