Mary Kalantzis
Mary Kalantzis was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before this, she was Dean of the Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. She has co-authored or co-edited with Bill Cope: New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (3rd edition, 2022); Literacies, Cambridge University Press 2012 (2nd edition, 2016); and the two volume grammar of multimodal meaning: Making Sense and Adding Sense, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Her 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.
Her 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.
Her 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.