The Potential of a Museum-School Partnership to Support Diversity and Multiliteracies-Based Pedagogy for the 21st Century

This thesis has two aims equally significant: firstly to explore the potential of an instructional approach for developing museum-school partnerships that would empower the multiliteracies experiences of diverse students; second to reveal the fine details of the performances deriving from these experiences. The focus is on the experiences of 4 schoolteachers, 2 museum educators and 36 primary students aged 10-12 years old in the island of Cyprus. The conceptual backdrop draws from the field of New Literacy Studies, the proposed Museum Multiliteracies Practice (MMP) framework derived from the multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group, the Learning by Design Model adapted from Cope and Kalantzis and Schwartz’s museum based pedagogy. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was utilised to undertake the research using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods and analysis. The research unfolded in three phases: the preliminary stage, the prototyping stage and the assessment stage. The thesis presents the design, enactment and evaluation of the Living Museum Partnership (LMP), a programme unfolded in 13 weeks for the construction of a student-generated virtual museum to support environmental education curriculum. The study contributes to an underexplored area of theory, research and practice towards fulfilling the vision of designing, implementing and evaluating museum-school partnerships for the 21st-century. Also, the research contributes to a growing field of study on theory-based museum learning practice that draws on inclusive pedagogies, in particular for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Finally, the research contributes to developing multimodal tools for empirical research. Findings from classroom observations as a participant observer and action researcher as the museum educator implementing the programme, semi-structured and focus group interviews, and questionnaires indicated that the LMP unfolded in an effective manner. Students’ repertoires of literacy were enhanced as they engaged in the learning process as active designers and multimodal learners.