Indigenous ways with literacies in an Australian primary school

This chapter explores Indigenous children's authentic multimodal meaning-making. The work is also notable for its collaborative methodology, where research participants and researchers come from very different cultures. The chapter presents data from a year-long literacy project with students aged 8 to 12 in an Indigenous primary school in South-East Queensland, Australia. Multimodal theorists acknowledge that their investigations have been generally restricted to Western visual communication, and the multimodality of Indigenous representations of knowledge is under-examined. Indigenous researchers have identified distinctive epistemologies of Indigenous groups. The chapter examines how the integration of knowledge principles can be embedded in the multimodal literacy learning of Indigenous children in school settings. For many Indigenous people, including Canadian and Australian Indigenous people, know ledge belongs to a particular people with a particular territory and language, which is sustained from generation to generation by the Elders and the tribe.

© 2019 compilation, original and editorial material, The Open University. All rights reserved.