The Teacher as Designer: pedagogy in the new media age

This article outlines a learning intervention which the authors call Learning by Design. The goal of this intervention is classroom and curriculum transformation, and the professional learning of teachers. The experiment involves the practical application of the learning theory to everyday classroom practice. Its ideas are grounded in pedagogical principles originally articulated in the Multiliteracies project, an approach to teaching and learning that addresses literacy and learning in the context of new media and the globalizing knowledge economy. The need for a new approach to learning arises from a complex range of factors - among them, changes in society and the economy; the potential for new forms of communication made possible by emerging technologies; and rising expectations amongst learners that education will maximize their potential for personal fulfillment, civic participation and access to work. The authors first brought together the Learning by Design team of researchers and teachers in 2003 in order to reflect upon and create new and dynamic learning environments. A series of research and development activities were embarked upon in Australia and, more recently, in the United States, exploring the potentials of new pedagogical approaches, assisted by digital technologies, to transform today's learning environments and create learning for the future - learning environments which could be more relevant to a changing world, more effective in meeting community expectations and which manage educational resources more efficiently. One of the key challenges was to create learning environments which engaged the sensibilities of learners who are increasingly immersed in digital and global lifestyles - from the entertainment sources they choose to the way they work and learn. It was also about enabling teachers to explicitly track and be aware of the relationship between their pedagogical choices and their students' learning outcomes. Background: the social conditions for the emergence of a transformative paradigm of learning A revolution is occurring in education. This revolution is being fuelled in part by the new information and communication technologies. Fundamentally, however, the change is in the human relations of learning. The reference point for the changes we will describe in this article is the traditional classroom. This classroom was essentially a communications technology, a room large enough for a teacher to talk to 20, 30, even 40 learners at once. Its classical oral communications modes were the teacher exposition, question and answer involving one learner at a time and whole-class recitation in unison. For most of the time, an individual learner had to sit in silence. The primary written communications medium in this classroom was the textbook (closely following the state-directed syllabus). The learners produced their work (a piece of writing, a test) for an audience of one - the assessing teacher. The main official trace of the student's work was a recorded score. The teacher was pivotal in the predominant communication patterns of the traditional classroom, orchestrating classroom talk, directing students to the textbook and marking their work or their tests. Lateral peer-to-peer communication was, for the most part, practically