Biography
Mary Kalantzis is Professor in the Department of Education, Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a world leader in the ‘new literacy studies’, focusing on multimodality and diversity in contemporary communications. In recent years she worked to conceptualize the nature of communication and learning in the digital age, focusing on the policy, practice and pedagogical design implications of new technologies in education, from early childhood to higher education. With Bill Cope, she is co-author or editor of: Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, Routledge, 2000; New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008/2nd edition 2012; Ubiquitous Learning, University of Illinois Press, 2009; and Literacies, Cambridge University Press, 2012. In recent years, her work research and development work has focused on developing and testing a web application supporting teachers in the pedagogical design process (the Learning by Design Project - http://newlearningonline.com/learning-by-design/ ), and Scholar, an online, multimodal student work space, supporting intensive peer-to-peer feedback and multifaceted formative assessment - http://learning.cgscholar.com/.
Research Interests
My academic research crosses a number of disciplines, including history, linguistics, education and sociology; and examines the varied themes of immigration, education, ethnicity, gender, culture, leadership and workplace change, professional learning and training, pedagogy and literacy learning.
My research activities in Australia have involved responsibilty for the management of, or major participant in, 116 research and development projects since 1991. I have been the recipient of ten large and four small Australian Research Council grants. A key set of projects have involved Multiliteracies research. This has been a decade long research initiative with colleagues from Australia, the United States and Britain to investigate the dual challenges for literacy teaching of cultural diversity and new communication technologies. It includes, participatory research in the area of multimodality and pedagogy working with teachers in Victoria, Australian Capital Territory (ACT), New South Wales and Queensland.
My efforts on issues related to immigration have included an international comparative study conducted for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, the development and documentation of Australian national policies linking school to work, several Queensland government-funded evaluations of services for immigrant communities that include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and an Australian federally-funded project on literacy skills required for work and training.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Education Policy, Organization and Leadership
Professor, Center for Global Studies
Faculty Affiliate, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Recent Publications
Cope, B., Kalantzis, M., & Tzirides, A. O. (2024). Meaning without borders: From translanguaging to transposition in the era of digitally-mediated meaning. In K. K. Grohmann (Ed.), Studies in Bilingualism (pp. 327-368). (Studies in Bilingualism; Vol. 66). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.66.13cop
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2023). A little history of e-learning: finding new ways to learn in the PLATO computer education system, 1959–1976. History of Education, 52(6), 905-936. https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2022.2141353
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2023). Creating a different kind of learning management system: The CGScholar experiment. In Promoting Next-Generation Learning Environments Through CGScholar (pp. 1-18). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-5124-3.ch001
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2023). Multiliteracies: A Literature Review. In G. C. Zapata, M. Kalantzis, & B. Cope (Eds.), Multiliteracies in International Educational Contexts: Towards Education Justice (pp. 34-75). (Multiliteracies and Second Language Education). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003349662-2
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2023). On Cyber-Social Meaning: The Clause, Revised. International Journal of Communication and Linguistic Studies, 21(2), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-7882/CGP/v21i02/1-18