Excellent - we just spoke about you - great that you are joining us - really engaged community.

• Mary Kalantzis

Hi Mary
What a great discussion in Community. I am logging in from Illinois and loving the dialogue. I have posted a placemat in Shares, designed by a teacher I worked with in Australia, Robyn Kiddy, for her kindergarten students. It incorporates three modes - gestural, visual and linguistic. She has numbered her activities showing the activities are not linear but move back and forth through the knowledge processes

• Rita van Haren

Just an extra comment: we do understand that these categories are not as linear as they might seem. So, even though we have planned our project/lesson according to these guidelines, they are, as such, only guidelines, which means that in the actual practice in the classroom, things normally do not go (nor do we expect them to) as linear as they are described in our project.

• Guilherme Kawachi

Our project (Carolina, Elis, Guilherme, Junot, Paula)

Target group: teenagers (13-16 years old)
Theme / Topic / Problematic: gender relations and sexism: stereotypes towards women

• EXPERIENCING
what is known = we would ask students to brainstorm about what they see as the women's and men's role (or what is considered to be typically the women's / men's role) in today's society. In these debate sessions, we would expect them to talk about their own experiences about the topic, what they would consider to be politically correct in terms of language use and discourse when talking about women, men and gender relations. Also, we would ask them to bring to the discussion examples of gender stereotypes that they had contact with in any means of communication, mainly in social networks, which is what (in our opinion) is what they would more closely relate to.

• CONCEPTUALISING
working with different genres to help them understand the different sexist representations, the concepts of gender in different disciplines, that can be found in different kinds of discourses, such as: scientific texts, entertainment articles, literature and so on. In these genres, we would lead them to reflect about how sexist stereotypes can be found, seen and mainly problematized in texts of popular access and theorize about what is gender in a cultural and historical perspective, not just biologically (the genres would be analyzed linguistically, as multimodal texts).

• ANALYSING
we would ask our students to bring examples of prejudice against women and sexist representations especially taken from the contact they have with social network. We have seen some news, in Brazil, related to this topic: the case of a group of feminist students who were protesting against the humiliation of young freshman girls on hazing practices at their first day at college, for example. So we feel like this is an important topic to be discussed. Other examples could be brought in by students themselves, so they could analyze and reflect about them.

• APPLYING
we would ask them to create a campaign seeking to raise awareness on sexist stereotypes and gender relations. This would allow them to work with different textual genres, but we also thought it would be interesting if they could create a Facebook page where they could post texts, photos, videos and any other relevant information that could help develop their own sensitivities on this topic. Another good practical measure, as Prof Cope suggested, would be asking them to create a policy against sexism and prejudice practices in school.

• Guilherme Kawachi

See also
http://newlearningonline.com/learning-by-design/the-placemat/

• Mary Kalantzis