Literacy Development and Normative Fantasies: What Can Be Learnt from Watching Students Over Time? (original) (raw)
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This thesis explores the lived experiences of fifteen Year 6 teachers in government schools within Victoria, Australia. It looks at some of the factors that influence teacher decision-making and the enactment of literacy, including sociological influences, constructions of childhood, and the lived experiences of teachers. Specifically, this research project explores teachers’ beliefs about what constitutes a 21st century literacy learning environment, what they perceive to be the literacy practices Year 6 students need to be exposed to now, compared to what they may require in the future, how this learning is enacted, and some of the factors that influence their pedagogical practices and decision-making. The thesis employs two methodologies; narrative inquiry and hermeneutic phenomenology to collect, interpret and present the stories from the research participants. From an ‘insider’s view’, the findings offer insights into teacher practices and decision-making, particularly concerning literacy in and for the 21st century. Teachers from metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria participated in a one-hour semi-structured interview during which they considered and shared their experiences, beliefs and practices associated with the teaching of literacy in and for the 21st century. The results are presented as a narrative of the lived experiences of the participants. Phenomenological analysis was applied to the individual narratives in order to present common themes. In the first of two results chapters, the stories from each participant are shared, to provide an insider’s view of their work, their pedagogical beliefs associated with the teaching of literacy, and the factors that influence their teaching. The second results chapter uses a phenomenological analysis to highlight the common themes. The themes explore conceptions of 21st century literacy, attitudes towards change, pedagogical orientations, and the influence of school-based leadership. Each theme starts with the voice of the participant, followed by an analysis to theorise the narrative using education and sociological literature, and concludes with my own reflections and recommendations. The ontological orientation of this research focuses on lived experiences, offering many ‘truths’ (Giorgi 1997) in order to better understand how teachers think about 21st century literacy and some of the factors that influence their pedagogical practices. This thesis advocates for a stronger consideration of the meaning of 21st century literacy, and the enabling pedagogical practices. It considers teachers’ understanding of, and attitudes towards, the sociological and educational influences that impact literacy in and for the 21st century. It explores how teachers construct learning for Year 6 students and presents evidence of the decision-making processes in which teachers engage when crafting and enacting literacy for Year 6 students in Victorian government schools.
LITERACY AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS: HISTORY, CHALLENGES, AND LESSONS
For Verhoeven, L., & Pugh, K., & Perfetti, C (forthcoming), Cross-linguistic perspectives on literacy education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press., 2017
Educators in Australian schools encounter opportunities and challenges comparable in kind to those encountered by many of their colleagues in other settings. They work in the midst of growing diversity among students, communities, and workplaces, uncertain support from governments in changeable times, the uneven quality of teacher education and professional learning, and ongoing debates over pedagogy and assessment, and over the role of research in improving their students’ learning. But Australian educators also encounter opportunities and challenges that are distinct, or at least inflected in particularly demanding or consequential ways. We aim here to outline some of these, focusing in large part on the less frequently discussed challenges and opportunities presented by Aboriginal and migrant education. In a piece of this scale we can hope to provide only a sampler of issues, of researchers and scholars who have productively addressed focal ideas, and of developments from other countries that have influenced the course of that work. We first sketch some prominent features of the demographic and administrative characteristics of Australian education. We then describe the challenges and opportunities presented to research, practice, and policy by educational engagements with Aboriginal and migrant communities, and the often noteworthy but generally patchy track-record of achievements arising from those engagements. Along the way we outline some recommendations arising from lessons this track-record may provide about literacy’s relationship to languages, to pedagogical practices, to policy formation and maintenance, and to the educational research environment. We then summarize international views of Australian literacy education, largely based on research from the Organization for Economic and Cultural Development (henceforth OECD), and the particular nature and history of the diverse research traditions that have substantially informed Australian literacy education. We conclude with some brief observations and lessons about the research, policy and media environments that literacy inhabits, as an object of, respectively, inquiry, regulation, and anxiety.
English in Education, 2012
This collection brings together only a small selection of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's many publications in New Literacy Studies (Lankshear's online research and publications list runs to 49 pages). Their partnership mirrors the dual aspect of New Literacy Studies: new ways of thinking about literacy and new (mainly digital) forms of literacy. Lankshear and Knobel met in 1992, when Lankshear had already published papers on popular literacy that are reproduced in this volume. Knobel was already alert to technology-led changes in literacy forms: she had begun programming in logo within her teacher education programme in 1984. The essays in this book form a history of the development of their thinking, and of the developing paradigms of New Literacy Studies, over more than 20 years. The volume encourages us to evaluate their achievement in the kind of academic polemic that they have made their own. The first chapters, by Lankshear alone, engage with the socio-historical meaning of literacy. 'Ideas of Functional Literacy', written in 1985, warns policymakers in his native New Zealand of the dangers of following American and British practice by promoting programmes in 'functional' literacy. The problems of this concept have been rehearsed many times, but Lankshear's critique is fundamental: the ambitions inscribed in the concept are politically naive, if not wilfully perverse; literacy is not a panacea for social ills. 'There is simply no chance that making all people functionally literate can put them in the way of a job' (p.11). Functional literacy, Lankshear argues, is an exercise in domestication, and the values underlying such programmes are dehumanising. 'The Dawn of the People', from 1986, describes a very different kind of literacy programme, through which more than 406,000 Nicaraguans gained 'Alfabetización' in a few months during the National Literacy Crusade of 1980. 'Alfabetización' involved learning to read through 'a direct relationship between the words … and [the reader's] own reality and circumstances'.
… Emerging Methodology for Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Literacy …
… on literacy research: Constructing meaning through …, 2000
The significance of developing a deep understanding of schools and their social organization is thatitcan inform policies and practices of urban education. Although there is much to beleamed from research that has helped to locate educational problems in the larger social conteXt, educators also need research methodologies and theoretical frames that provide the possibility of more local explanations for the dilemmas and problems facing urban education. Situated understandings of education provide insight into the cognitive and social consequences of educational policies and practices (Moll, this volume). We endeavor to provide these situated understandings by examining more critically the theoretical constructs that currently underlie the educational treatment of students in general, but particularly of linguistically and culturally diverse students and of the routine practices of urban classrooms and schools (see Ball, Dyson, Lee, this volume). The goal of our research, then, is not only to provide a langnage for describing urban schooling and its literacy practices, but also to provide a critical analysis of their outcome. We draw on our body of research in urban education, literacy learning and its social organization, and the relationship of literacy learning to the practices of the local community to propose the following J)'Tlcretic framework for the study of literacy in formal and nonformal educational settings. Syncrnic here refers to the principled QC,
Rethinking literacy studies: From the past to the present
Proceedings of the 1996 World Conference on Literacy, 1996
Reviewing the research literature in literacy studies demands patience to deconstruct the multilayered meanings of the concept of literacy. Literacy is a loaded term that is also embedded in myths associated with social and economic progress, political democracy, social and educational mobility, and the development of cognitive skills. Graff (1995) reminds readers that literacy has historically represented and continues to represent different things to people. Scribner (1988) "unpackages literacy" by using the metaphors of "adaptation," "power," and "state of grace"-if students' literacy skills are at level they are in the adaptive mode, below level and they have fallen from grace, and above level they attain power or status. Viewed as an abstract set of decontextualized skills, literacy contributes to the creation of the "deficit" model in educational and social systems. This model has been applied in many remedial reading and writing programs at all educational levels. Ironically, attempts to teach literacy skills in the schools often restricts literacy development because of educators' lack of knowledge and awareness of the interweaving of social, cultural, and oral literacy contexts of language use and identity. Students' language use in other contexts dramatically conflicts with school discourse and many students fail to acquire higher literacy skills. "Multiliteracies" must be studied in many contexts to better understand their role in instruction and curriculum development. There is a pressing need to define and recognize "non-schooled" literacies associated with different mediums and tools, including the technological, visual, and mathematical, and literacies associated with using information technology. (Contains 58 references.) (NKA)
Australian Literacies: Informing National Policy on Literacy Education. Second Edition
This book is designed to inform national policy on literacy education in Australia. A preamble describes the general literacy crisis in Australia, which includes systematic underperformance in English literacy among some groups and many individuals (who are often seriously disadvantaged in their occupational and educational opportunities). The book notes that improvement of literacy for all Australians seeks to respond to personal, civic-cultural, and economic needs. The book includes six sections: (1) "Broad Contexts" (e.g., the powers of literacy and citizenship, social equity, and competence); (2) "What a National Policy on Literacy Should Say" (e.g., policy context, defining literacy, and teaching cycles); (3) "Australia's Learners" (e.g., Australian English speakers, language diversity, and indigenous Australians); (4) "School Literacy Education" (the early, middle, and late years); (5) "Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESL Education...
1998
The significance of developing a deep understanding of schools and their social organization is thatitcan inform policies and practices of urban education. Although there is much to beleamed from research that has helped to locate educational problems in the larger social conteXt, educators also need research methodologies and theoretical frames that provide the possibility of more local explanations for the dilemmas and problems facing urban education. Situated understandings of education provide insight into the cognitive and social consequences of educational policies and practices (Moll, this volume). We endeavor to provide these situated understandings by examining more critically the theoretical constructs that currently underlie the educational treatment of students in general, but particularly of linguistically and culturally diverse students and of the routine practices of urban classrooms and schools (see Ball, Dyson, Lee, this volume). The goal of our research, then, is not only to provide a langnage for describing urban schooling and its literacy practices, but also to provide a critical analysis of their outcome. We draw on our body of research in urban education, literacy learning and its social organization, and the relationship of literacy learning to the practices of the local community to propose the following J)'Tlcretic framework for the study of literacy in formal and nonformal educational settings. Syncrnic here refers to the principled QC,
The Construction of Literate Cultures in Disadvantaged Schools: Teachers' Work, Children's Work
1993
Recent debates focus on literacy curriculum as if it is separate from teachers' other work, almost at times as if teachers and their contexts are irrelevant to what is the most appropriate literacy pedagogy. Perhaps learning to read and write is not hard work, but teaching is, no matter which theoretical orientation about literacy is adhered to. The multiplicities of other functions that teachers enact leave them positioned in contradictory ways against their imagined ideal literacy classroom. These contradictions sent one researcher into disadvantaged schools to talk with and observe teachers at work. This paper is a first exploration of these investigations in one school. The paper considers, through the stories and classroom discourse of teachers and their students, the question: What kinds of literate cultures do teachers construct in a disadvantaged school? It offers texts from everyday school and classroom life to reconsider what teachers do as they develop a literate culture. It describes the kinds of literate work that children do and discusses the dominant discourses that surround the construction of literate cultures at school. The paper provides examples of the ways in which these teachers make spaces for other kinds of literate cultures and the ways in which classrooms are sites for multiple and at times contradictory literacies which compete for time and priority. (Contains 19 references.) (NKA) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.