Professor Len Unsworth, an English and Literacies Education professor at the Australian Catholic University, is NIE’s visiting consultant for a research project titled: ‘Toward Effective Multimodal Meaning-Making with Visual Data in Geography through Productive Classroom Talk’. Professor Unsworth was at NIE from 3 to 7 June at the invitation of Dr Tricia Seow and Assistant Professor J.J. Zhang from the Humanities and Social Studies Education (HSSE) Academic Group, as well as Dr Caroline Ho from the English Language Institute of Singapore (ELIS).

Funded by MOE Academies Fund, the aim of this multi-disciplinary project is to develop an approach for integrating the effective use of classroom talk to guide multimodal data analysis in geography and improve students’ disciplinary literacy.

During his time at NIE, Professor Unsworth worked with the team to review the data and refine the coding structure for geography teachers’ classroom talk and related written materials. Dr Seow and Dr Ho will draw on the team’s experience to present on the challenges involved in doing multi-disciplinary research at the MOE Research Forum on 10 October 2019.