Abstract

”Children make meaning in the form of images, music, dance, drama and media arts as much as reading and writing. They are basic tools of communication. Children’s literacy learning through these modes should be observable and measurable.”

This seminar provides opportunity for you to problematise the above statement, and to examine how the integration of different modes of text might work together in children’s music improvisation to organise and develop information and ideas. Discuss how transcripts of videos as selective constructions, not objective evidence, can assist learning.

Bio

MICHELLE TOMLINSON is an Adjunct Research Associate at Griffith University, Australia. Her interest in Social Semiotics involved studying video analysis with Gunther Kress at IOE , London and Theo van Leeuwen (Sydney University of Technology). Using multimodal text analysis that is freed from the dominance of the written and spoken word, she focuses on gesture, music and visual spaces as crucial to literacy and storytelling, Her transcriptions of these modes inform learning in the arts.