Teaching Writing and Representing in the Primary School Years

This book offers a number of distinctive and critical contributions to building teachers' pedagogic content knowledge for 21st century literacies. While deeply concerned with situated practices of language and literacy and creating pathways towards critical and transformed practice, each of the authors brings deep knowledge of both the WHAT and the HOW of scaffolding those practices and pathways. This includes knowledge of the multiple and simultaneous ways in which language and other semiotic systems interact to make meaning across a range of print and digital multimodal texts and, crucially, a metalanguage to make those meanings visible to students. Metasemiotic knowledge also underpins the HOW of the explicit pedagogic practice which is demonstrated creatively throughout the book. Teachers are guided carefully through the stages of a scaffolding curriculum cycle, ie. the teaching and learning cycle, which is informed by foundational theories of Vygotsky, Bruner, Halliday and Painter as well as by the authors' evidence-based research and practice in Australian contexts.