1,721,076 research outputs found
Collaborative Literacy Research and Why It Matters
No full textIn this chapter we summarise the outcomes of the Australian Research Council project that is the subject of this book. We then discuss the importance of three key aspects of our study: collaborative research, linking teacher wellbeing and the sustainability of the profession to teachers' agency, and teachers' systematic research on their own practice. The authors revisit the main goals of the project in relation to new literacy demands, outlining why this kind of collaborative research into changing pedagogies and curriculum matters, especially in current social conditions, and how the inquiries of the teacher researchers summarised in this book illustrate the value of such collaboration. We have taken teachers' wellbeing to be an integral element of this research. We argue that it is an essential aspect of increasing teachers' agency and thus enhancing the sustainability of the profession. We also contend that a productive and challenging way of achieving this wellbeing is through increasing teachers' access to, and capacity to engage in, research inquiries
Editors' introduction : literacy, learning & culture
No full textWe come together as editors to prepare an introduction to this international volume at a time of economic turbulence, new uncertainties about the future, and a growing demand on the part of most governments for further alignment of education with the economy. Literacy, in particular, is in the vanguard, for literacy only too frequently is positioned as a proxy for education. What are the purposes of literacy teaching and how is it to be achieved? What counts as literacy in ‘new times,’ in ‘participatory culture’ where people ‘believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another’ (Abrams and Merchant, Chapter 23)? How can everyone be included as critical citizens of the world in whatever definition of literacy we endorse?\ud
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What fresh perspectives, new ways of thinking, and good ideas for the understanding of literacy are out there? What are the possibilities for the future? An exploration of these kinds of questions and their answers, however tentative, provides us, we believe, with our best defense against the uncertainties of our age. In some respects this is our overall purpose in the volume, to explore our understanding and future possibilities by bringing together critical reviews of the major theories, methods, and pedagogical advances that have taken place in the past 20 years in the field of literacy research at the primary/elementary school level. Each chapter in the volume is newly written for the Handbook while overall the book is intended to be a distillation of key thinking and theory which offers new directions for research in literacy. It aims to revisit current interpretations, make novel connections, frame new possibilities, and encourage researchers to pursue innovative and compelling lines of inquiry..
Space, place and power : the spatial turn in literacy research
No full textPlace matters to literacy because the meanings of our language and actions are always materially and socially placed in the world (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). We cannot interpret signs, whether an icon, symbol, gesture, word, or action, without taking into account their associations with other meanings and objects in places. This chapter maps an emergent strand of literacy research that foregrounds place and space as constitutive, rather than a backdrop for the real action. Space and place are seen as relational and dynamic, not as fixed and unchanging. Space and place are socially produced, and hence, can be contested, re-imagined and re-made. In bringing space and place into the frame of literacy studies we see a subtle shift – a rebalancing of the semiotic with the materiality of lived, embodied, and situated experience. ..
Foreword
No full textThis Foreword introduces key concepts explored in Pahl and Rowsell’s Literacy and Education, Including artifactual critical literacy, multimodality and design. It gives a sense of the rich narratives, sites and classroom examples which feature in the book – key elements of a New Literacy Studies approach, but here applied to classroom practice
Reading engagement research : issues and challenges
No full textThis chapter gives an overview of reading engagement research, drawing on cognitive and socio-cognitive, sociological, ethnographic, historical-and-educational survey, curriculum, pedagogy, and economic research perspectives. This multidisciplinary approach enlightens many issues central to reading engagement, but also many that are central to wider educational research including the social context of learning, the nature of reading instruction in schools, and the extent to which researchers, and the research knowledge they generate, might be able to prevent policy makers opting for narrow, technocratic pedagogies and frameworks for curriculum design and assessment. Adult reading engagement forms the family backdrop for children's reading engagement at home. Researchers have identified three overarching aspects of research definitions of engagement and how they are operationalized in the research literature: behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement
Literacy, Place and Pedagogies of Possibility
No full textHow can teachers ensure a pedagogy of possibility underpinned by social justice, and what has literacy got to do with this? This book explores the positive synergies between critical literacy and place-conscious pedagogy. Through rich classroom research it introduces and demonstrates how a synthesis of insights from theories of space and place and literacy studies can underpin the design and enactment of culturally inclusive curriculum for diverse student communities, and illustrates how making place and space the objects of study provide productive resources for teachers to design enabling pedagogical practices that extend students' literate repertoires. The argument is that systematic study of and engagement with specific elements of place can enable students' academic learning and literacy
Literacy for a sustainable world
No full textThis chapter describes the ways in which primary school teachers design curriculum to develop children's knowledge about sustainability. Such a curriculum is highly engaging and provides enhanced motivation for children to engage with complex reading and writing as they attempt to represent what they have learned and communicate this to the wider community. The chapter introduces key terms including place-based pedagogy, sustainability and critical literacy and shows how these ideas can be brought together in classrooms
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