Kathy A Mills
Biographic Data
| ID | 317281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kathy A Mills |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kathy A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mills |
| SIGNATURE | MILLS K A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1140-3545 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Critical attributes of future K-12 schooling to inform policy and practice: A scoping review
This scoping review synthesises research to answer the key question: ‘What are the key attributes of future-focused K-12 schools to serve the changing learning and education needs of students in the digital age?’ An iterative step-by-step thematic coding process and a series of analysis workshops led to the generation of four key attributes to inform policy and practice for future K-12 schools to serve the changing needs of students and communiti…
Using qualitative research co-design for intergenerational perspectives of online play
In highly digitised societies, children and adults have qualitatively different perspectives of contemporary online play activities, such as children's synchronous use of multiplayer virtual worlds (e.g. Minecraft) with video-chat software platforms (e.g. FaceTime) in the family home. This article explains how insight into these different intergenerational perspectives was gained via a novel research co-design. Philosophically underpinned by the …
Smart glasses for 3D multimodal composition
Extended reality technologies – mixed, augmented, and virtual reality, and future-related technologies – are rapidly expanding in many fields, with underexplored potentials for multimodal composition in digital media environments. This research generates new knowledge about the novel wearable technology – smart glasses – to support elementary students’ multimodal story authoring with 3D virtual objects or holograms. The researchers and teachers i…
Virtual and augmented reality text environments support self-directed multimodal reading
Virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies are two of the fastest-growing technologies anticipated to peak this decade, with a gap in research to understand the new multimodal affordances for teachers to support students’ self-directed interactive reading. This research aimed to understand early adolescents’ experiences of reading multimodal texts containing written and spoken language and 3D imagery in VR and AR text environments. The …
Coding and Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum: A Review of Educational Outcomes
Teaching coding and computational thinking is an emerging educational imperative, now embedded in compulsory curriculum in the United States, Finland, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia. This meta-synthesis of 49 studies critically reviews recent international research (2009–2022) of coding and computational thinking as core and integrated across the curriculum. It addresses four essential problems: (a) What are…
Multiplayer gaming and autism: Social communication through repetitive behaviours
The popularity of online multiplayer gaming among primary‐school students, including autistic students, has rapidly increased over the past decade. Social characteristics and interactions of autistic students have been a focus of research, but less attention has been given to the relationship between online multiplayer gaming and social communication, and repetitive behaviours. This paper reports on a case study that described three students' at‐…
Video gaming and digital competence among elementary school students
Engagement with video games can potentially advance student digital competence however, there is a digital skills gap by the time young people progress into adolescence. This current research explores how elementary school students’ digital self-efficacy might relate to experiences in video game environments to influence perceptions of digital competence. We examine the differential impact of sex, self-efficacy, and socioeconomic status (SES) on …
The CRAFTS learning framework: Equipping learners to create relevant, accessible, fun, tailored and scholarly activities in higher education
Tertiary institutions are migrating away from didactic and teacher-centred approaches, and instead, pivoting to lesson designs that encourage hands-on learning and student engagement. However, this practice is often "try and see", with few frameworks providing evidence-based approaches for practical application that demonstrates how learning can be successfully achieved. The literature supports foundational concepts that can be applied to develop…
Adolescents’ critical, multimodal analysis of social media self-representation
In a digital society, adolescents’ lives are heavily influenced by various multimodal texts published on social media platforms. Digital texts challenge conventional forms of literacy teaching while requiring new forms of critical media literacy. Previous research has shown that teachers require professional development and support to include critical media literacy in the classroom. In this article, we report the findings from a study of two low…
Virtual reality games for 3D multimodal designing and knowledge across the curriculum
Immersive virtual reality (VR) is anticipated to peak in development this decade bringing new opportunities for 3D multimodal designing across all levels of education. The need for students to gain capabilities with multimodal texts—texts that combine two or more modes, such as spoken, written, and visual—is emphasised at all levels of education from P-12 in the Australian Curriculum. Likewise, the use of technology-supported pedagogies is increa…
AI, Concepts of Intelligence, and Chatbots: The “Figure of Man,” the Rise of Emotion, and Future Visions of Education
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy. Focus of Stud…
What do secondary teachers think about digital games for learning: Stupid fixation or the future of education
Digital games can support learning across many levels and fields of education. This article shares findings from a study of Australian high school English teachers designed with a mixed response questionnaire about using digital games in the classroom. The findings identified polarised teacher perspectives on the role of gaming in formal curriculum, tension in teachers’ ideal and enacted use of digital games, and a need for in-practice profession…
Immersive virtual reality (VR) for digital media making: Transmediation is key
The rapid evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies and their adoption for learning opens up new possibilities for shifting semiotic content across modes, with underexplored scope for transmediating content in visual, haptic, and auditory ways in immersive media literacy practices. This research investigated users’ creative digital designing involving a popular, three-dimensional virtual painting program with upper elementary students who us…
Boys’ gaming identities and opportunities for learning
This article addresses a gap in research about primary school boys’ identification as ‘gamers.’ Drawing on a survey of 318 Year 3 (7–8 years old) students, the research identified boys’ self-reported enjoyment for gaming, their frequency using digital devices, and their self-rated digital skills. Interviews with four boys from the survey also explored the lifeworlds of self-professed ‘gamers.’ Findings point to the salience of games for many boys…
Virtual Reality and Embodiment in Multimodal Meaning Making
Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learn…
Multimodal Language Rights and Indigenous Totemic Identity: Cross-Cultural Participatory Research
Indigenous language rights and identity practices are marginalised in education, bringing a need for mainstream educators to understand and respect Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and sharing knowledge. Engaging elementary students (ages 4.5 to 12 years), the cross-cultural participatory research was conducted for three years to understand Indigenous language practices that were multimodal, including digital storytelling, singing, e-book makin…
Globalisation, cultural knowledges and sociomateriality in Middle Eastern education: How the global and local influence classroom practices
This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical ethnography was employed over three years using participant observation and interviews analysed from …
Rhythm in literary apps
This article addresses how rhythm may function in literary apps. The article has two aims: increasing the knowledge of how literary apps work as texts, by exploring their aspects of rhythm, and developing the understanding of the theoretical term of rhythm. The authors propose a rhythmanalysis in which two different types of rhythm – reading rhythm and narrative rhythm – are taken into account. The two types of rhythm may both occur at different …
Towards a typology of touch in multisensory makerspaces
This research examined the role of touch in creative media production in the context of educational and community makerspaces. Touch, while only recently explored in digital media production, is a crucial perceptive sense through which to experience the world, particularly in two- and three-dimensional making, and to explore texture, temperature, and vibration. As an embodied experience through the hands, fingers, and other body parts, touch affo…
English language teaching of attitude and emotion in digital multimodal composition
Multimodal Language of Attitude in Digital Composition
Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic …
Multimodal Attitude in Digital Composition: Appraisal in Elementary English
Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two year…
The emotional trade-off between meaningful and precarious work in new economies
The contradictory work environments of new economies in late modernity are associated with a range of emotional experiences, requiring diverse emotion management strategies. Late modernity offers the capacity to pursue happy, safe, rewarding, and meaningful work for the privileged few; a potential trade-off between stressful meaningful and boring precarious work for a greater number; and the prospect of non-meaningful, precarious work for many in…
Happy, Stressed, and Angry: A National Study of Teachers’ Emotions and Their Management
The teaching profession offers meaningful, stimulating work that accords with teachers’ sense of professional pride and identity, but is also synonymous with high levels of stress, conflict (and associated emotions such as anger and shame) and ultimately, attrition. The degree to which teachers within a national population ‘up-manage’ the former or ‘down-manage’ the latter emotions is unknown. This study utilises new data from the Australian Surv…
Big Data for Qualitative Research
Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges.The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments.Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other network…
Shrek Meets Vygotsky: Rethinking Adolescents' Multimodal Literacy Practices in Schools
Recent research has emphasized the multimodal and digital nature of adolescent literacy practices. These practices cross multiple social spaces, particularly settings outside of schools. This article re-examines current research to yield three caveats that counter assumptions about the pervasiveness, relevance, and spontaneity of youths' multimodal practices in the digital communications environment: (1) It is incorrect to assume that today's ado…
What are the threats and potentials of big data for qualitative research
Amid the big claims of big data, analytics, datification, and data mining, this article answers central questions for qualitative research. In the debates about the enormity and ubiquity of data in the digital world, qualitative research endeavors are seemingly threatened. But is big data necessarily better? Can big data answer the fundamental questions that qualitative researchers ask? This article interrogates the key issues for qualitative res…
Big Data for Qualitative Research
Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges.The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments.Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other network…
Emotion management and solidarity in the workplace: A call for a new research agenda
Research focusing on the management of emotion features prominently in studies of employee attrition, gender inequality and workplace satisfaction, but rarely in research on worker solidarity. Against a backdrop of increasing individualisation within late modern society, research about workplace management of emotion has become bifurcated along sociological or organisational psychology lines. Within the sociology literature, management of emotion…
Globalisation, cultural knowledges and sociomateriality in Middle Eastern education: How the global and local influence classroom practices
This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical ethnography was employed over three years using participant observation and interviews analysed from …
The emotional trade-off between meaningful and precarious work in new economies
The contradictory work environments of new economies in late modernity are associated with a range of emotional experiences, requiring diverse emotion management strategies. Late modernity offers the capacity to pursue happy, safe, rewarding, and meaningful work for the privileged few; a potential trade-off between stressful meaningful and boring precarious work for a greater number; and the prospect of non-meaningful, precarious work for many in…
Happy, Stressed, and Angry: A National Study of Teachers’ Emotions and Their Management
The teaching profession offers meaningful, stimulating work that accords with teachers’ sense of professional pride and identity, but is also synonymous with high levels of stress, conflict (and associated emotions such as anger and shame) and ultimately, attrition. The degree to which teachers within a national population ‘up-manage’ the former or ‘down-manage’ the latter emotions is unknown. This study utilises new data from the Australian Surv…
Online multiplayer games for the social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorder: A resource for inclusive education
This article describes the support for social interactions received by three students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) through their multimodal engagements with Minecraft®. The data were collected through at-screen observations and semi-structured interviews. Multimodal analysis of the data demonstrated that online multiplayer games supported social interactions through modes, such as speech, writing and gesture, and within physical and virtu…
Access to multiliteracies: A critical ethnography
This paper reports the key findings of a critical ethnography, which documented the enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an Australian elementary school classroom. The multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group is a response to the emergence of multimodal literacies in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Giddens’ structuration theory was applied to the analysis of systems relations. The key finding …
Rhythm in literary apps
This article addresses how rhythm may function in literary apps. The article has two aims: increasing the knowledge of how literary apps work as texts, by exploring their aspects of rhythm, and developing the understanding of the theoretical term of rhythm. The authors propose a rhythmanalysis in which two different types of rhythm – reading rhythm and narrative rhythm – are taken into account. The two types of rhythm may both occur at different …
Access to multiliteracies: A critical ethnography
This paper reports the key findings of a critical ethnography, which documented the enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an Australian elementary school classroom. The multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group is a response to the emergence of multimodal literacies in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Giddens’ structuration theory was applied to the analysis of systems relations. The key finding …
Have You Seen Lord of the Rings ?” Power, Pedagogy, and Discourses in a Multiliteracies Classroom
Literacy today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning making in the context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity, giving rise to the multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group. This article responds to these imperatives, reporting findings from a critical ethnography investigating the interactions between pedagogy, power, and discourse, and students' access to multiliteracies among culturally and lingui…
A Review of the “Digital Turn” in the New Literacy Studies
Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highl…
Shrek Meets Vygotsky: Rethinking Adolescents' Multimodal Literacy Practices in Schools
Recent research has emphasized the multimodal and digital nature of adolescent literacy practices. These practices cross multiple social spaces, particularly settings outside of schools. This article re-examines current research to yield three caveats that counter assumptions about the pervasiveness, relevance, and spontaneity of youths' multimodal practices in the digital communications environment: (1) It is incorrect to assume that today's ado…
Microblogging as a Literacy Practice for Educational Communities
With the advent of Web 2.0, the “social web,” microblogging has emerged as a popular literacy practice through platforms such as Twitter. Yet the potential of microblogging in educational communities is currently underexplored. This case study of 150 preservice teachers shows how microblogging can positively influence reading and writing, with implications for literacy instruction in primary, elementary, and secondary settings
New Directions for Digital Video Creation in the Classroom: Spatiality, Embodiment, and Creativity
In recent years, we have both produced scholarship in the area of digital video production or filmmaking in classroom and after school settings. This email conversation between us is a great way for us to share our current thinking on this topic, and the new areas of video composing pedagogy that we are exploring
A Queer Critical Media Literacies Framework in a Digital Age
Media literacy skills are focal for many educators across the globe in an age of ubiquitous access to the Internet and the rapid circulation of digital texts. A critical media literacies perspective is often a key element in teaching adolescents to read a range of texts. A queer critical media literacies pedagogy supports a social justice agenda aimed at addressing inequalities in education for youths who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans…
IP ad Animations: Powerful Multimodal Practices for Adolescent Literacy and Emotional Language
In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. This article draws on appraisal theory and original research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2‐D cartoon animations using drawings with an …
Online multiplayer games for the social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorder: A resource for inclusive education
This article describes the support for social interactions received by three students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) through their multimodal engagements with Minecraft®. The data were collected through at-screen observations and semi-structured interviews. Multimodal analysis of the data demonstrated that online multiplayer games supported social interactions through modes, such as speech, writing and gesture, and within physical and virtu…
What are the threats and potentials of big data for qualitative research
Amid the big claims of big data, analytics, datification, and data mining, this article answers central questions for qualitative research. In the debates about the enormity and ubiquity of data in the digital world, qualitative research endeavors are seemingly threatened. But is big data necessarily better? Can big data answer the fundamental questions that qualitative researchers ask? This article interrogates the key issues for qualitative res…
Happy, Stressed, and Angry: A National Study of Teachers’ Emotions and Their Management
The teaching profession offers meaningful, stimulating work that accords with teachers’ sense of professional pride and identity, but is also synonymous with high levels of stress, conflict (and associated emotions such as anger and shame) and ultimately, attrition. The degree to which teachers within a national population ‘up-manage’ the former or ‘down-manage’ the latter emotions is unknown. This study utilises new data from the Australian Surv…
Big Data for Qualitative Research
Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges.The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments.Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other network…
Emotion management and solidarity in the workplace: A call for a new research agenda
Research focusing on the management of emotion features prominently in studies of employee attrition, gender inequality and workplace satisfaction, but rarely in research on worker solidarity. Against a backdrop of increasing individualisation within late modern society, research about workplace management of emotion has become bifurcated along sociological or organisational psychology lines. Within the sociology literature, management of emotion…
English language teaching of attitude and emotion in digital multimodal composition
Multimodal Language of Attitude in Digital Composition
Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic …
Multimodal Attitude in Digital Composition: Appraisal in Elementary English
Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two year…
The emotional trade-off between meaningful and precarious work in new economies
The contradictory work environments of new economies in late modernity are associated with a range of emotional experiences, requiring diverse emotion management strategies. Late modernity offers the capacity to pursue happy, safe, rewarding, and meaningful work for the privileged few; a potential trade-off between stressful meaningful and boring precarious work for a greater number; and the prospect of non-meaningful, precarious work for many in…
Towards a typology of touch in multisensory makerspaces
This research examined the role of touch in creative media production in the context of educational and community makerspaces. Touch, while only recently explored in digital media production, is a crucial perceptive sense through which to experience the world, particularly in two- and three-dimensional making, and to explore texture, temperature, and vibration. As an embodied experience through the hands, fingers, and other body parts, touch affo…
Immersive virtual reality (VR) for digital media making: Transmediation is key
The rapid evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies and their adoption for learning opens up new possibilities for shifting semiotic content across modes, with underexplored scope for transmediating content in visual, haptic, and auditory ways in immersive media literacy practices. This research investigated users’ creative digital designing involving a popular, three-dimensional virtual painting program with upper elementary students who us…
Boys’ gaming identities and opportunities for learning
This article addresses a gap in research about primary school boys’ identification as ‘gamers.’ Drawing on a survey of 318 Year 3 (7–8 years old) students, the research identified boys’ self-reported enjoyment for gaming, their frequency using digital devices, and their self-rated digital skills. Interviews with four boys from the survey also explored the lifeworlds of self-professed ‘gamers.’ Findings point to the salience of games for many boys…
Virtual Reality and Embodiment in Multimodal Meaning Making
Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learn…
Multimodal Language Rights and Indigenous Totemic Identity: Cross-Cultural Participatory Research
Indigenous language rights and identity practices are marginalised in education, bringing a need for mainstream educators to understand and respect Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and sharing knowledge. Engaging elementary students (ages 4.5 to 12 years), the cross-cultural participatory research was conducted for three years to understand Indigenous language practices that were multimodal, including digital storytelling, singing, e-book makin…
Globalisation, cultural knowledges and sociomateriality in Middle Eastern education: How the global and local influence classroom practices
This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical ethnography was employed over three years using participant observation and interviews analysed from …
Rhythm in literary apps
This article addresses how rhythm may function in literary apps. The article has two aims: increasing the knowledge of how literary apps work as texts, by exploring their aspects of rhythm, and developing the understanding of the theoretical term of rhythm. The authors propose a rhythmanalysis in which two different types of rhythm – reading rhythm and narrative rhythm – are taken into account. The two types of rhythm may both occur at different …
AI, Concepts of Intelligence, and Chatbots: The “Figure of Man,” the Rise of Emotion, and Future Visions of Education
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy. Focus of Stud…
Psychology (24 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Pedagogy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Literacy, Media, and Education (15 works) · Political science (12 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Multimedia (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Child Development and Digital Technology (9 works)