Learning by Design: crafting the Knowledge Processes to enable pre-service secondary teachers to design authentic learning

Helen CD McCarthy

In my experience working with university preservice secondary teachers, it has been said that some Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematic (STEM) students are sceptical of having to study literacy units within their degree. Their reasoning is that there is no purpose for the teaching of literacy as they are far more concerned with honing their STEM subject content knowledge.

I want to draw on the experiences of first year secondary students who learned to apply a pedagogy of eight Knowledge Processes (Kalantzis & Cope, 2009)-things you do to know-of Experiencing the known and the new, Conceptualising by naming and with theory, Analysing functionally and critically and Applying appropriately and creatively into their teaching design.

Knowledge Processes are an activity type which represent a distinct way of making content knowledge by oscillating and weaving pedagogical repertoires (Luke & Freebody, 2004) including multimodal multiliteracies intentionally designed to help students to understand what they need to do in this world in order to know (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).

The point of sharing the pre-service students’ testimonies is to reveal the transformatory processes they moved through, from healthy scepticism to openly revealing how the new order multimodal multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) impacted positively on their capacity to develop engaging and authentic learning in ways they had not previously imagined.