Abstract:
Text production is rapidly evolving because of digital communication technologies and multimodal forms of text. Yet within the current Australian Early Years of schooling context, educators are observing Governments publicly fixating on high-stakes tests to show national writing achievements. Text production risks losing its focus on multimodality unless educators can carefully craft pedagogies to thwart a standardised conception of what it means for learners to produce text. This presentation presents analytic work of two educators’ carefully crafted pedagogies, involving a crisscrossing of the pedagogic midline, in their attempt to spark text production of learners between five and six years-of-age in a Preparatory classroom. The methodological approach taken was to use McKenney and Reeves’s (2012) design-based research (DBR) as the framework for designing, constructing, implementing, evaluating and reflecting on text production. DBR generated knowledge of educators’ pedagogies through qualitative data methods of video and audio recordings, co-generative dialogues, and multimodal artefacts over a four-week timeframe. Bernstein’s (1975) analytic tool of framing was utilised to analyse educators’ pedagogies. Insights are provided into educators’ repertoire of pedagogies framing their crisscrossing of the pedagogic midline. This includes new understandings about educators’ and learners’ pedagogic relationshipand the extent to which the relationship sparked multimodal text experiences to bolster the literacy practice of text production.Findings suggest that the practice of crisscrossing the pedagogic midline gives rise to creating new texts, in different ways, and in different forms and leads to opportunities for learners to show their cognitive, linguistic, social, and affective competencies. Carefully crafted pedagogies to spark productive aspects of text needs to be carefully considered by Early Years educators and Early Years education to disrupt standardised paper-based conceptions of text production.