Abstract

In response to international scholarship and policy addressing valuable learner dispositions and capacities, Australian teachers of English are required to integrate creative and critical thinking with the interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. These requirements assume widespread pedagogical knowledge of both creativity and multimodality, two highly complex and contested areas which sit at odds with normative approaches to English teaching. This article draws on findings from research that investigated English teaching that sought to integrate multimodality and creativity. It draws on qualitative data emanating from the pedagogies of a primary teacher deploying plugged and unplugged multimodal pedagogies to motivate students to imagine, create, collaborate, critique, and refine texts. New pedagogical knowledge is offered through a theoretical framework identifying temporal pedagogical movements; modes of meaning and their opportunities for transduction; media and materials that supported engagement with multimodality; and how these aligned with pedagogies that enable creativity, simultaneously addressing multimodal meaning-making and creative capacities.