ABSTRACT
This chapter explores about collaborative inquiries and ethnographies of teacher's work in high poverty context that illustrates how the design of literacy curriculum and pedagogies can enable children's to engage in complex learning. As Pahl and Rowsell points out, children's literacy learning is done with artifacts and objects which come to have meaning and significance; teacher's work is similarly organized in and around with material objects, and frequently semiotic. The semiotic work occurs across multiple modes and media: through verbal interactions, written texts, embodied actions, classroom furniture arrangements, broadcast messages, semi-permanent signage and several ephemeral postings of student's work. Pedagogy is discursive work, but it also involves the production of broader semiotic and socio-material relationships. Somerville has also written extensively about what she has learned about place-conscious pedagogy through her ongoing shared inquiries and journeys with the Aboriginal people.
