Introduction

This chapter provides narrative illustrations from Ontario, Canada, of a case study of professional learning to support early primary teachers (that is, teachers of children aged 3.8– 8 years) in designing and implementing multimodal pedagogies. We offer these illustrations as a resource for hope (Williams, 1966), or a way of thinking about teacher professional learning that can support rich, meaningful and democratic literacy education in an era when neoliberal discourses dominate. Specifically, we present the example of teacher-participant ‘Esther’s’ first-grade classroom that was unruly and unfocused, and then transformed into a hive of innovative, multimodal pedagogies and practices. We detail how the professional learning introduced new pedagogical repertoires, materials and ideas into the classroom, providing resistance to reductive literacy pedagogies. The changes promoted connected, purposeful literacies, joyful engagement in learning, and new relationships between children, teachers, materials and their meaning-making. We frame these findings within a view of professional learning that defies neoliberal approaches to professional development aimed at increasing test scores while deprofessionalising teachers.

Context of the study

The study took place in Ontario, Canada. Governance of education in Canada is a provincial/territorial responsibility. As the most populous province, Ontario is a potentially powerful influence in the country. In terms of literacy education, Ontario is also a global force, with Allan Luke identifying Ontario as an example of successful curricular reform (Literacy Research, 2018) and the British Broadcasting Corporation naming Canada an ‘education superpower’, pointing to Ontario's ‘strong base in literacy’ as part of the reason for its potency (Coughlan, 2017).

There is evidence that Ontario's lauded literacy education is entangled in neoliberal discourses that limit spaces for teachers to privilege children in curriculum-making (Schwab, 1973), to support the expansion of children's literacy options (that is, the opportunities that children have to be active makers of meaning and curriculum through engagement with multiple modes, media and genres) (Heydon, 2013), to exercise their professional discernment in developing and enacting literacy-related pedagogies (Hibbert and Iannacci, 2005), and to participate in professional learning that supports teachers to enact these (Hibbert et al, 2013). We understand curriculum-making (Schwab, 1973) as the process of forging responses to questions such as what should be learned and how, and agree with the literature that centres children and teachers in this process (for example, Harste, 2003).