Investigating relationships between literacy research, policy and practice: a critical review of the related literature (original) (raw)
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English Teaching Practice and Critique, 2012
This article considers the role of research in disentangling an increasingly complex relationship between literacy policy and practice as it is emerging in different local and national contexts. What are the tools and methodologies that have been used to track this relationship over time? Where should they best focus attention now? In answering these questions this paper will consider three different kinds of research perspectives and starting points for enquiry: 1. Policy evaluation. The use of a range of quantitative research tools to feed policy decision-making by tracking the impact on pupil performance of different kinds of pedagogic or policy change (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2010). 2. Coconstruction and policy translation. This has for some time been a central preoccupation in policy sociology, which has used small-scale and context specific research to test the limits to the control over complex social fields that policy exercises from afar (Ball, 1994). Agentic re-framings of policy at the local level stand as evidence for the potential to challenge, mitigate or reorder such impositions. 3. Ethnographies of policy time and space. Ethnographic research tools have long been used to document community literacy practices, and in training their lens on the classroom have sought to focus on the potential dissonance between community and schooled practices. It is rarer to find such research tools deployed to explore the broader policy landscape. In the light of debate within the field, part of the purpose of this article is to examine how ethnographic research tools might be refined to study how policy from afar reshapes literacy practices in the here and now. (Brandt and Clinton, 2002).
Researching literacy policy: Conceptualizing trends in the field
London Review of Education
The Literacy Policy Project examines the trends in UK government policy interventions into literacy curriculum and pedagogies in schools in England. We undertake a policy scholarship methodology to read policy texts through a conceptual framework that frames policy interventions with functional, realist or socially critical purposes. We identify how successive UK governments have primarily adopted functional policies and research relating to literacy in schools in England. We argue that policy is dictated by, and serves, a growing marketplace for educational solutions, making the case that more prominence should be given to facilitating socially critical approaches to literacy policy.
Literacy Research and Policy Development: Mapping the Dominant Discourses
2000
Discourse analysis reveals how the meanings of literacy are both socially produced and variable between different discourses. A recent consultation with researchers is used to demonstrate how the outcomes were influenced by the discourses of participants and organizers. An argument is made to establish a literacy discourse analysis tradition to make effective use of existing knowledge, to assist those without a policy voice to be heard at the table, and to democratize and legitimize policy development processes. In particular, public literacy policy needs to address a broader range of needs than the technical-rational needs of the labor market and the economy.
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...
Policy analysis and document-based literacy research
Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 2013
In Lisa Patel Stevens's undergraduate training as a print journalist, a professor handed her the journalistic charge succinctly: A newspaper should convey what it was like to be alive on that day in that place. Fairly straightforward, right? However, even a cursory scratch of the surface of that statement agitates and enlivens the complexity that spills over the capacity of texts to capture lived realities neutrally. For example, depending upon the news source, the fl ooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster of climate patterns or a human-made disaster of civil engineering. Also depending upon your lived experiences, the reporting of these events may be, in and of themselves, textual acts that perpetuate racial inequities in the United States. It is within this complexity of texts as representative and agentive that policy analyses and document-based literacy research fi nds itself.
Australian Literacies. Informing National Policy on Literacy Education
This book, which is intended to inform Australia's education community about various aspects of the national literacy debate and the policy development process, reviews the literature on literacy teaching in secondary and postsecondary education and the workplace and describes the sociocultural and educational context for development of literacy policy and programs in the 1990s. Among the topics discussed in the book's six parts are the following: part 1, broad context of literacy education (the powers of literacy; literacy levels among Australians; and citizenship, social equity, and competence); part 2, necessary content of a national policy on literacy (policy context; purpose and scope; definitions; considerations in defining literacy; teaching cycles); part 3, Australia's learners (Australian English speakers, language diversity and English literacy, indigenous Australians, special needs, socioeconomic disadvantage); part 4, school literacy education (the early year...
The enactment of literacy curriculum policy by early childhood teachers in two Australian schools
Literacy, 2018
Since the early 2000s, literacy education has become an area of intense focus in Australian education policy, positioned to have a role in Australia's pursuit of enhanced international competitiveness in the "global knowledge economy". Policy called for improvements in literacy outcomes, monitored by mandated annual assessments, and policy statements recognised the need to establish solid literacy foundations in early childhood to facilitate learning, and desired improvements, in later years. This article is derived from a larger study that investigated the production and enactment of literacy curriculum policy by early childhood teachers in Australian schools. It focuses on the school level within the State of Western Australia, presenting findings derived from thematic and critical discourse analysis of participant interview and documentary data collected in two case-study schools. Comparative analysis revealed that literacy curriculum policy processes in both case-study schools were focused on achieving improved test results in mandated testing regimes. This was impacting upon literacy curriculum in the early childhood years of schooling, in Australia deemed to involve children up to 8 years of age, in many, possibly adverse, ways. These findings may offer insights in other contexts about literacy curriculum policy processes that are focused on enhancing competitive positioning.
The changing face of literacy policy in Victoria
Aare 2008 Changing Climates Education For Sustainable Futures, 2009
In the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, literacy has undergone a fundamental change in the shift from page to screen as the dominanl basis ./'or communication. In a communications environment characterised by multimodalityintegration of modes of linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial modes o.f meaningyoung people require a broadened repertoire ofliteracy capacities.