1,721,040 research outputs found
An interview with Professor Barbara Comber
No full textAs part of this special issue on 'Literacy for social justice', and at this moment of post-pandemic transitions in education, we invited Professor Barbara Comber to reflect on the needs for and trends in critical literacy education, both in her local context, in Australia, and internationally. In September 2022, we met with Barbara online to discuss her thoughts about what critical literacy educators need, how scholars and educators can work together to produce change, and where we can see hope in critical literacy and social justice education right now, as part of promising anti-racist, decolonizing, and intersectional literacy frameworks and practices
Deficient "Disadvantaged Students" or media-savvy meaning makers? Engaging new metaphors for redesigning classrooms and pedagogies
No full textIn this article article submitted to the McGill Journal of Education, Pat Thomson and Barbara Comber argue that students in disadvantaged schools are very often seen as lacking in ability, motivation and appropriate academic skills. In a practitioner-university co-research project which investigated literacy learning, information and communication technologies and educational disadvantage, students were engaged in making short films about the new technologies in their school. The authors look at the metaphors that they used in and as their films: apprentice theorists, word players, cadet film producers, novice researchers and global communicators. They suggest that each of these metaphors highlights ways in which students can be meaningfully engaged in learning
Book Review: International Handbook of Research on Children’s Literacy, Learning, and Culture. Kathy Hall, Teresa Cremin, Barbara Comber & Luis Moll. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 584 pages.
Full text linkInternational Handbook of Research on Children’s Literacy, Learning, and Culture. Kathy Hall, Teresa Cremin, Barbara Comber & Luis Moll (2013)
A Conversation with Barbara Comber
No full textDr. Barbara Comber is known for her work in the areas of creative teaching pedagogy, critical literacy, poverty, and social justice. In particular, she studies the kinds of teaching practices that make a difference to young people\u27s literacy learning trajectories and what gets in the way. Barbara has collaborated on and conducted a number of competitively funded research projects concerned with literacy development, teaching and socioeconomic disadvantage. Her work has appeared in Theory into Practice, Linguistics and Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, The Reading Teacher, Curriculum & Inquiry, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, Language Arts, Teaching Education, Critical Studies in Education, International Journal of Educational Research, Discourse, International Journal of Innovation in Education, Australian Geographer, Australian Educational Research, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, and many other journals. Her books include Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility. She has co-edited a number of books including the International Handbook of Research in Children\u27s Literacy, Learning and Culture, Literacies in Place: Teaching environmental communications, Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms, and Turn-around pedagogies: Literacy interventions for at-risk students. She has also authored or co-authored over 100 book chapters. Her work has been funded by the Australian Research Council, the Spencer Foundation, Myer Foundation, and Education Departments in Australia. Barbara has developed or contributed to language and literacy teacher education materials in a number of Australian states, the US and Canada. In 2015, she was elected member to the Reading Hall of Fame and in 2022, Barbara was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for her services to education. Dr. Comber is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, Education Futures at the University of South Australia
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Turn-around pedagogies: Improving the education of at-risk students
No full textInternationally, normative discourses about literacy standards have rapidly proliferated, and spaces for teachers to engage in serious intellectual inquiry seem to be shutting down. Our concern about the impact of these forces on teachers led us to design a cross-generational teacher research project across two states of Australia to tackle some of the toughest challenges teachers face in their workplaces, including the issue of unequal outcomes in literacy achievement. In this article we report on how the project design sustained an intel-lectual community of inquiry and fostered ‘turn-around pedagogies’. We include excerpts from recent teacher writing (Comber and Kamler, 2005) to illustrate how teachers used technology and popular culture to reengage their most at-risk students. We argue that cross-generational models of practitioner inquiry hold great promise for improving the learning engagement of students, the productivity of schools and the professional renewal of the teacher workforce
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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