i-Kindy: Responding to home technoliteracies in the kindergarten classroom

The paper brings together results of two comparative case studies conducted in a rural region in New South Wales Australia, and draws on interviews, student and teacher surveys and participant observations to form the empirical data set. All teachers in the study acknowledged that young people enter school with a repertoire of technoliterate practices, and they recognised the value of creating a new pedagogical landscape for interpreting and producing texts in kindergarten classrooms. However, for some of these teachers their belief about their own capacity in this field acted as a barrier for expanding their own repertoire of technoliterate practice (some even abandoned what they know about effective teaching in kindergarten). For others, school-based practices serve to constrain what was possible in kindergarten classrooms. Utilising contemporary understandings of multiliteracies (Anstey & Bull, 2006; New London Group, 1996), this paper discusses two main areas: student home-school technoliteratepractices and professional learning (as a group of untechno-savvy teachers responded to the challenges of integrating Information Communication Technology (ICT) in their kindergarten classrooms). In professional learning communities (Wenger, 1998), teachers in one case study project worked together to build understandings and develop practices, which created responsive learning spaces that, built on kindergarten student's repertoire of home technoliterate practices. The teachers firstly gathered and responded to assessment information; and secondly, they harnessed the notion of 'technology as text'; and thirdly through focused transformative dialogue and practical action they changed classroom practices. The 'Framework for the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies' [through the elements of 2 situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformative action] (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) served as a useful theoretical approach for the change processin the study.