Developing Literate Practices in Design and Technology Education

Abstract

This chapter reports on research that details the emerging literacy demands faced by both the teachers, and the students who are participating in Design and Technology education within secondary schools across Victoria, Australia. The processes of design are at the centre of the curriculum for Design and Technology education and they are the main content focus of both the teacher’s work of developing curriculum and teaching, and for the learner’s engagement. In this chapter the field of Design and Technology education is presented and discussed as a site where communication, interpretation and articulation of learning and understanding are inexplicably bound up with texts and literacies. In order to ground the discussion in the specifics of an authentic program, the curriculum and pedagogical practices associated with the current Year 12 Design and Technology program are analysed to illustrate the development and use, (production and consumption) of texts, particularly multimodal texts, within new, emerging and multi-literacies. In this way the chapter acknowledges the significance of literacy development across the school curriculum. This chapter also takes up a point made by Unsworth (2001) that literacy as a social practice takes up numerous and different forms in the various fields across the curriculum, therefore this research analyses explicitly what the development of literate practices specifically look like in the field of Design and Technology education.