novel to be transformed by the students form of ‘readings’ to ‘popular’ forms, such
as film and cartoon. This enabled the students to bring forms of engagement to the
English classroom that they might be familiar with in their everyday literacy practices
and as such expanded the notion of school literacy at that moment, even if
temporarily.
The multimodal emphasis on the themes of the novel in the CD-ROM, together with
the devices of authorial intent and social-historical context revealed in the structure of
the CD-ROM, offer the students a meta-level entry into the novel and provides them
with new tools for navigating the text. The structure of the CD-ROM offers new
potentials for the comparison of characters and the need to think about the entity
‘character’ beyond the text, as a complex entity realised through the dynamic social
interaction of many voices over time. This repositioning of the entity of ‘character’
served as a reflexive tool for its study.
Crucially, the resources of the CD-ROM offer students the potential to engage with
the text both as ‘imaginative non-fiction’ and ‘historical fact’. The entity ‘character’
is represented in the CD-ROM in a number of ways including ‘character’ as realised
in the novel, stage and film productions of the novel, the realisation of Steinbeck’s
imagination (and life), and the fictional diary account of the harsh reality of the lives
of ‘real’ people. This potential to engage with the novel both as fact and as fiction is
important in light of current debates on gender and literacy which suggests that many
boys find non-fiction a more accessible route into literacy (Moss, 2001). The CD-
ROM’s demand that students shift between the domain of fact and fiction, and the
merging of the boundaries between the two, demands different kinds of imaginative
work of the ‘reader’ than do the traditional focus of the novel as fictional literature.
The Reshaping of Curriculum Entities in School Mathematics
In the move from page to screen in the use of Toontalk in school Mathematics the
entities ‘rule’, and ‘bounce’ are transformed. I have shown that each of the modes
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