Month: October 2018

Key researchers Dr Rebecca Jesson and Naomi Rosedale presented a workshop entitled The Three Dimensional Digital Landscape at the New Zealand Literacy Association (NZLA) Conference in Palmerston North.

The workshop began by posing questions about how online landscapes increasingly mean that students need to employ higher order literacy, thinking and social skills to engage with and through texts. They used a three-dimensional metaphor to describe how a new model of literacy could equip students to think “higher,” “wider” and “deeper.” These three dimensions of the digital landscape correlate to three main modes of engagement in higher-order thinking:

• Synthesis — bringing knowledge together from multiple sources to create new meanings
• Critical thinking and critical literacy — being able to recognize how a text positions the reader and whose interests it serves
• Practice and transfer — repeated opportunities to explore similar ideas in new forms and contexts

The researchers then presented a model of pedagogy that builds on what are commonly termed  “21st century” skill sets and in ways that supports integration into the everyday classroom curriculum. They showed how learning can be designed, with a wide set of texts and the support of the project’s digital tools, to develop higher order thinking, wider interactions (inter-personal and inter-textual with text sets) for deeper understandings.

Might a traditional focus on writing and oratory to persuade (e.g. speech; formal debate) rather than consider, be reinforcing a single perspective reasoning profile? In what ways might a strong focus on persuasive argument have unintended consequences when transferred to online environments, and also embody norms and dispositions that are inadequate for interactions, values, and thinking in the 21st century? How might the use of online discussion platforms be integrated into everyday literacy work to provide opportunities to practice argumentation instead of persuasion?

The digital tools and resources they showcased to illustrate model integration and multi-literacies were a critical literacy game tool, student-generated digital learning objects (DLO), and an argumentation discussion board.

Click on the slide deck below to view the full presentation:

This morning, Mike Hosking of Newstalk ZB spoke to our principal investigator Stuart McNaughton about argumentation and empathy.

In the age of increasing digital classrooms, Woolf Fisher Research Centre director Stuart McNaughton said that learning how to argue and be more empathetic would help kids learn to think about other people’s positions.

Professor McNaughton is concerned the concept hasn’t been put in the foreground at schools, when it’s something people need to be good at.

“They don’t have to be separate from these things, you know, maths and science, you think about having a really good argument about fracking or drilling for oil or sustainability.”

Listen to the full interview here.

Recently, the team from TV3’s Newshub Nation spoke with our principal investigator, Professor Stuart McNaughton, about what skills we need to teach children in schools.

Newshub reports:
Increasingly digitised classrooms call for a new way of teaching, with more focus on critical analysis and argument, argues one Kiwi academic.

Professor Stuart McNaughton is Director of the Woolf Fisher Research Centre, developing educational programmes for communities in South Auckland.

“Our children, generally speaking, are not very good at having an argument. Now my grandchildren tell me that you shouldn’t argue,” Professor McNaughton told Newshub Nation.

“In fact, there are good ways to argue and the critical reasoning form of argumentation is a form in which you are able to think about the other person’s position.”

Watch the full interview and read the article here.