Examining the opportunities for digital text production in the Australian Curriculum for the first years of school

Digital technology has long been ubiquitous in many communities within Australia and internationally, thereby requiring suitable digital proficiencies. While a majority of Australian children experience digital literacies as part of their everyday lives, limitations in access disadvantage others. In educational settings, there is a clear need for teachers to incorporate the digital literacies of learners while also working towards addressing inequities by providing rich literacy experiences that bring together print and digital forms of texts. Well-established understandings about the importance of literacy development early in a child's life support teachers of the first years of school to teach essential digital literacies. In Australian schools, teachers are mandated by a range of documents, including the Australian Curriculum, that provide content for teachers to teach. Situated within a frame of New Literacies theories, this paper reports findings from analyses of the ways these mandated documents may support teachers in the first years of school to design learning experiences that respond to learners' needs in producing digital texts. We then determine implications for teachers' responsiveness to these documents. With the recent release of the Australian Curriculum version 9.0, we argue for the pedagogical knowledge that teachers require to implement digital text production experiences within the mandates of the curriculum and, consequently, the professional learning they need for realising the potential of all children's digital capabilities in their classrooms. [Author abstract]