Community chest: varieties of learning from Kiwi communities (original) (raw)
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Community chest: Acquiring varieties of literacy from Kiwi communities
Despite its richness, the community remains an underutilised resource for migrant and international students of EAL. This paper reports on a three-year study investigating and evaluating the cultural and linguistic value of volunteering in community placements to degree-level EAL learners. Using open-coded data from reflective journals, this paper discusses the range of literacies that 60 second-year degree-level EAL learners describe having demonstrated during placements. The study is framed within social identity theory and constructionist conceptualisations of communities of practice. For this paper, more recent real-world emphases of new literacy approaches offer fresh frames for social constructionism. We see our learners, situated within specific literate communities, developing cultural literacies as social practices. Here we discuss six varieties of cultural literacy. We maintain that learning in community contributes not only to increased communicative confidence, but also contributes to learners’ advancing agency through its potential to provide real-world contexts where cultural literacies develop.
‘The real world’: Lived literacy practices and cultural learning from community placement
‘Real world’ communities beyond the classroom, volunteer communities in particular, offer migrant and international students of English as an Academic Language (EAL) chances to participate in authentic linguistic and cultural interactions. This paper describes findings from a three-year study investigating and evaluating the cultural and linguistic value of volunteering in community placements to degree-level EAL learners. In particular, this study reports on students’ application of communicative and lexical knowledge acquired in class but practiced in real world communities. Further, it reports on learners’ acquisition of potentially useful procedural knowledge, and on their situated learning through encountering ‘Discourses’ (Gee, 1990). Using data from learners’ reflective journals, this paper discusses four ‘lived literacy practices’ (Barton & Hamilton, 2000) that 60 second-year degree-level EAL learners describe. New Literacy Studies (NLS) approaches to linguistic and cultural acquisition offer fresh frames for understanding learners’ living of literacy practices. These approaches sit within social constructionism, where learning trajectories occur in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991 and Wenger, 1996), and alongside poststructuralist notions of identity formation where identities are in flux and subject to learner investment (Norton, 2000).
Reshaping educational experience by volunteering in community: Language learners in the real world
Journal of Intercultural Communication, 2011
This paper views tertiary language learners' gaining a sense of cultural belonging and an awareness of intercultural communication through three prisms: (i) the metaphor of "investment", (ii) the notion of "community of practice" and (iii) the concept of "imagined community". Applied to environments of real world learning, specifically the volunteer sector, the notion of "community" holds a key to reshaping the cultural education experiences for participants in language learning programs, including learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL). This paper examines facets of "community" to contextualise the experiences of learners in a project where advanced EAL learners undertook volunteer work as part of a cultural learning curriculum within a Bachelor of Arts in EAL at a tertiary institute in New Zealand. This project gave learners access to "communities of practice" (Lave & Wenger 1992; Wenger 1998), providing contexts where instructors can reshape learners' higher education experiences by identifying cultural learning opportunities within the volunteer sector of the community. In educational research, the properties of community include insider support, common goals, shared discourse and membership (Rovai 2002a). The occurrence of such features in a student's volunteer placement depends on the degree of "investment" (Norton 2000; Pittaway 2004) participants have in individual and community goals. In the project, the journalised reflections of the participating migrants, refugees and international students reveal the cultural and ontological value of community work. This paper uses the concepts of real and imagined communities to theorise the participants' investments in their learning, presents qualitative findings from the project, and describes a range of benefits for EAL learners' learning in community. The paper concludes that investing in community can prepare learners for their future and imagined communities while reshaping significant aspects of cultural learning.
This paper views tertiary language learners’ gaining a sense of cultural belonging and an awareness of intercultural communication through three prisms: (i) the metaphor of “investment”, (ii) the notion of “community of practice” and (iii) the concept of “imagined community”. Applied to environments of real world learning, specifically the volunteer sector, the notion of “community” holds a key to reshaping the cultural education experiences for participants in language learning programs, including learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL). This paper examines facets of “community” to contextualise the experiences of learners in a project where advanced EAL learners undertook volunteer work as part of a cultural learning curriculum within a Bachelor of Arts in EAL at a tertiary institute in New Zealand. This project gave learners access to “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger 1992; Wenger 1998), providing contexts where instructors can reshape learners’ higher education experiences by identifying cultural learning opportunities within the volunteer sector of the community. In educational research, the properties of community include insider support, common goals, shared discourse and membership (Rovai 2002a). The occurrence of such features in a student’s volunteer placement depends on the degree of “investment” (Norton 2000; Pittaway 2004) participants have in individual and community goals. In the project, the journalised reflections of the participating migrants, refugees and international students reveal the cultural and ontological value of community work. This paper uses the concepts of real and imagined communities to theorise the participants’ investments in their learning, presents qualitative findings from the project, and describes a range of benefits for EAL learners’ learning in community. The paper concludes that investing in community can prepare learners for their future and imagined communities while reshaping significant aspects of cultural learning.
Community Placement: Windows into Cultural Understanding and Unfamiliar Freedom
This paper explores our students’ experiences of community placement. Community placement is a safe and valuable way for advanced migrant and international learners of English to provide the “unfamiliar freedom” (Dlaska, 2000) necessary for learning for an unknown future (Barnett, 2004). Further, this happens within a context of the acquisition of cultural autonomy. The process of joining and becoming a part of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), however peripherally, opens windows into aspects of culture, revealing to view Kiwi turns of phrase, behaviours, communication styles and thought patterns. Our research data was collected from year two Bachelor of Arts in English as an Additional Language (BA EAL) learners, whose community placement provided opportunity for reflection on their experience. Their diaries revealed that community placement contributes to the process where “authentic being” (Barnett, 2004) starts to form. In these reflective recollections, comprising the data for this study, the students record ‘windows into cultural understanding’ and moments where they describe their placement’s impact on their sense of self. Our study is backgrounded by the poststructuralist model (Norton, 2000) where identity involves “struggle”. This contributes to fostering “authentic being” and prepares students culturally for whatever self they need for their future global and/or national identities. Keywords:
Reshaping Educational Experience by Investing in Community
The notion of “community” holds a key to enhancing higher education experiences for learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL), a core discipline of the vocational education and training (VET) sector in New Zealand. This paper contextualises the experiences of advanced EAL learners investing and participating in assessed community placements. Community placements represent a pedagogical intervention effectively giving learners access to communities of practice in a meaningful, authentic, real-world context. Pedagogically, they create learning contexts where instructors can reshape learners’ experiences by preparing students to explore and experience the linguistic and cultural potential of community. In the project, the journalised reflections of migrants and international students participating in a degree in EAL in New Zealand reveal the linguistic, cultural and ontological value of community work. The study uses the concepts of learner investment, communities of practice and imagined communities to theorise the participants’ learning, presents key qualitative findings about the cultural, linguistic, and transformative capital of community placements, and suggests they are valuable pedagogical interventions that can help reconfigure teaching and learning EAL in VET contexts.
Co-Constructing Opportunities for Shared, Collective Literacies Learning in Communities in Fiji
Routledge eBooks, 2023
The critical participatory action research project discussed in this chapter was situated in three communities in Fiji. Across three years, children, families, community leaders and mentors, research partners, and university researchers collaborated to build community capacity for fostering preschool children’s multilingual literacies in their home languages and English. An agreed goal was to co-create multilingual texts with participating children that represented their lives, experiences, and aspirations—noting Fiji’s three official languages are Bauan (associated with Fiji’s iTaukei people), standard Hindi (connected with Indo-Fijians) and English (Fiji’s language of government, schooling, and media). We begin this chapter by sharing details about our project and project participants. Next, we use the dialogic structure of talanoa to explore OfL that were generated in the three project communities. We close the chapter by considering insights about OfL in community settings.
Teaching and Teacher Education, 2010
The Communities of Practice (CofP) framework and theories of engaged participation have profoundly shaped how we theorize, investigate, and represent a variety of learning and teaching processes, both in and out of classroom contexts. Within this framework, useful distinctions have been made between a teaching curriculum and a learning curriculum, with the former being interrogated for ascribing limited identities to its learners and the latter valued for the ways it prioritizes learning (and its resources) from a learner's perspective. Analysis of data collected utilizing ethnographic methods (e.g. document collection, participant observation, interviews) demonstrates that, even though the teaching curriculum of one adult ESL program itself provided limited ''structuring resources'' (and learning opportunities) to its learners, the learners' participation in the program helped them to recognize and value the kinds of engaged participation necessary to access membership in local workplace communities of practice. However, findings also show that while these adult learners of English managed to learn and adopt the practices of one community of practice, they remained excluded from legitimate membership in other communities of practice. The analysis raises questions about the limits and possibilities of a teaching curriculum that values ''real world'' experiences (and situated learning) in theory but does not prioritize them in practice.