While incorporating digital technologies into the classroom has offered new ways of teaching and learning into educational processes, it is essential to take a look at how the digital shift impacts teachers, school administration, and curriculum development. Academic Knowledge Construction and Multimodal Curriculum Development presents practical conversations with philosophical and theoretical concerns regarding the use of digital technologies in the educational process. This book will also aim to challenge the assumption that information accessibility is synonymous with learning. It is an essential reference for educators and practitioners interested in examining the complexity of academic knowledge construction in multimodal, digital worlds.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical stepby-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions. The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students' perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical stepby-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions. The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students' perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

We live immersed in what appears to be a paradox between coherence and complexity. It is the gap between the modern presuppositions we largely live by and the emerging presuppositions we are testing which makes this seem chaotic. It is the pull of the individual and the collective and their multi-layered discourses. Your role as a teacher, as the one who crafts the magic of knowing, is to be the auteur, the author, the director, the conductor, who understands where the students are situated and inspires them to levels of understanding where they become the experts. You need to be the listener and the one to guide constructively the path which knits emerging personal meaning with understanding and shared knowledge. The outcome will be a text which you have never read, a piece of music you have never heard, and a portrait you have never seen. This is the collective voice of common discourse, and it is limitless. The groundwork for a common discourse, I suggest, lies in as-ifing, making meaning of a series of multiple possibilities. Each of us has been brought up in a society with a set of relative presuppositions about the way things work and what things mean. We can acknowledge different voices by thinking of them as a series of small cautionary tales, related to us and by us about the way things might be.

We live immersed in what appears to be a paradox between coherence and complexity. It is the gap between the modern presuppositions we largely live by and the emerging presuppositions we are testing which makes this seem chaotic. It is the pull of the individual and the collective and their multi-layered discourses. Your role as a teacher, as the one who crafts the magic of knowing, is to be the auteur, the author, the director, the conductor, who understands where the students are situated and inspires them to levels of understanding where they become the experts. You need to be the listener and the one to guide constructively the path which knits emerging personal meaning with understanding and shared knowledge. The outcome will be a text which you have never read, a piece of music you have never heard, and a portrait you have never seen. This is the collective voice of common discourse, and it is limitless. The groundwork for a common discourse, I suggest, lies in as-ifing, making meaning of a series of multiple possibilities. Each of us has been brought up in a society with a set of relative presuppositions about the way things work and what things mean. We can acknowledge different voices by thinking of them as a series of small cautionary tales, related to us and by us about the way things might be.