Three and a half years ago I went back into classroom teaching at Carr Hill Primary school after more than six years in advisory work. One of the many highlights of my time at the school was taking part in an action research project with Petula Bhojwani of Birmingham City University and Cath Wilkes of Nottinghamshire LA looking at the impact of developing a whole school approach to the teaching of Literacy using multimodal strategies. This was as part of a cross LA project involving schools from a range of areas in Nottinghamshire which also involved support from the LA ICT curriculum team who ensured that all teachers were enabled to use the technology they wanted to in order for the children to express themselves in a range of ways.
As someone who was already a fan of the work of Bearne and Wolstencroft and using some of the approaches recommended in Visual Approaches to teaching writing it was fascinating to see how other teachers took the the use of a wider range of texts in a range of media and the use of the meta language around multimodal devices.
The work undertaken by staff and children was awe inspiring and this mirrored much of what was taking place in the other schools. The three of us were invited to put our findings and more importantly planning, resources and children’s work from the project into a publication.
This has now been released by UKLA with case studies from each year group and an accompanying CD ROM supporting teachers who wish to adopt some of the strategies. This includes support for the ICT aspects of this work.
The book is now available and hopefully will help teachers and schools further develop their use of ICT and the use of multimodal strategies in the primary classroom.