Abstract
The article features a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled
students to think in terms of design and multimodality. In an effort to innovate
our own literacy teacher education work, we came together to devise a course
that encouraged students to adopt a design lens to their thinking, planning, and
assessing of literacy learning. We saw this qualitative case study as a way to
understand the interrelationships of learning processes, principles of design and
multimodal texts, and how these might inform pedagogy. Building on years of
work in the areas of multimodality and multiliteracies, we observed how eight
teachers with varying degrees of comfort with multimodality moved into a
design-oriented approach to literacy education. The article presents our research
on design-oriented teacher education work, but the findings illuminate how the
adoption and inhabiting of different mindsets and metalanguage can make a difference.