Children's writing goes 3D: a case study of one primary school's journey into multimodal authoring

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Linkage Project “Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy", which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This project is being conducted in over 20 schools around Australia. The data presented in this paper focuses on one such school, located in Tasmania. It explores one school’s endeavour in the teaching and learning of multimodal narrative. Data includes interviews from students and multimodal analysis of student narratives.

The paper showcases the kinds of semiotic choices the children are making for their stories, and includes excerpts from the interviews to illustrate how they are able to articulate justifications for their choices. In particular it focuses on how children are establishing literary concepts such as genre, characterisation and point of view using all semiotic resources. In doing so, it considers the pedagogy behind the creations to explore how effectively it works as children create new kinds of texts which are innovative, critical, creative and ‘of quality’.