Allan Luke

Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning: Two takes on the critical

This important volume on the critical pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. This paperback edition on the pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Committed to language education that contributes to social justice - and the political, economic, and sociocultural changes such justice requires - the contributors explore the meaning of creating equitable and critical instructional practices, by exploring diverse representations of knowledge. In addition, recommendations are made for further research, teacher education, and critical testing. Graduate students and researchers in TESOL, applied linguistics, and education will find this volume a thought-provoking and comprehensive presentation of theory and practice in this important new area of scholarship.

Generalizing Across Borders Policy and the Limits of Educational Science

This essay is a critique of the scientific and policy rationales for transnational standardization. It analyzes two examples of policy export: early childhood standards in one of North America’s oldest Indigenous communities and the ongoing development of international standards for university teaching. It examines calls for American education to look to Finland, Canada, and Singapore for models of reform and innovation, focusing on the complex historical, cultural, and political settlements at work in these countries. The author addresses two affiliated challenges: first, the possibility of a principled understanding of evidence and policy in cultural and political-economic context, and second, the possibility of a mediative educational science that might guide policy formation.

Critical Literacy: Foundational Notes

This article traces the lineage of critical literacy from Freire through critical pedagogies and discourse analysis. It discusses the need for a contingent definition of critical literacy, given the increasingly sophisticated nature of texts and discourses.

The Body Literate: Discourse and Inscription in Early Literacy Training

The collection will cover all the major fields of discourse studies: including, grammar, stylistics, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, argumentation, psychology of comprehension, ethnography of speaking, and media. It will include classic articles, work from the top scholars in the field, and reflect all the significant debates.

Reading Positions and Practices in the Classroom

ABSTRACTThis article examines the classroom construction of “readings” in school literacy and literature programs. Reviewing contemporary theories and definitions of literacy, it argues for the cultural and historical specificity of reading and writing as families of social practices. School texts and classroom events construct selective traditions of particular versions and displays of reading. An agenda for the reconstruction of school reading as discourse critique is outlined.

On the Material Consequences of Literacy.

Research in the ethnography of literacy has led to a stronger focus on literacy as a social practice among researchers and educators. How literacy is ideological and how it is linked to issues of institutional structure and power needs more systematic focus, particularly in the contexts of rapid and unprecedented economic, cultural and sociodemographic change affiliated with globalisation. A case is made for a refocus on the material consequences of literacy including an understanding of literate practice, capital and exchange, both local and transnational.

After the marketplace: Evidence, social science and educational research

This paper is an essay on the state of Australian education that frames new directions for educational research. It outlines three challenges faced by Australian educators: highly spatialised poverty with particularly strong mediating effects on primary school education; the need for intellectual and critical depth in pedagogy, with a focus in the upper primary and middle years; and the need to reinvent senior schooling to address emergent pathways from school to work and civic life. It offers a narrative description of the dynamics of policy making in Australia and North America and argues for an evidence-based approach to social and educational policy — but one quite unlike current test and market-based approaches. Instead, it argues for a multidisciplinary approach to a broad range of empirical and case-based evidence that subjects these to critical, hermeneutic social sciences. Such an approach would join educational policy with educational research, and broader social, community and governmental action with the aim of reorganising and redistributing material, cultural and social resources.

Authentic and conventional assessment in Singapore schools: an empirical study of teacher assignments and student work

This is an empirical examination of the quality of teacher assignments and student work in Singapore schools. Using a theoretical framework based on principles of authentic assessment and intellectual quality, two sets of criteria and scoring rubrics were developed for the training of expert teachers to judge the quality of assignments and student work. Following rigorous training, the inter‐rater reliability of expert teacher scoring was high. Samples of teacher assignments and student work were collected in English, social studies, mathematics, and science subject areas from a random stratified sample of 30 elementary schools and 29 high schools. For both grade levels, there were significant differences for the authentic intellectual quality of teachers’ assignments by subject area. Likewise, the differences of authentic intellectual quality for student work were significant and varied by subject area. Subject area effect was large. The correlations between the quality of teachers’ assignment tasks and student work were strong and significant at both grade levels. Where teachers set more intellectually demanding tasks, students were more likely to generate work or artefacts judged to be of higher quality. The findings suggest that teacher professional development in authentic intellectual assessment task design can contribute to the improvement of student learning and performance. It is argued that this will be a key requisite of educational systems like Singapore that are seeking to expand pedagogy and student outcomes beyond a focus on factual and rote knowledge.

Adolescence Lost/Childhood Regained: on Early Intervention and the Emergence of the Techno-Subject:

This article is a materialist philosophical and historical analysis of the current policy focus on early intervention programmes for print literacy. It documents the direct impact of economic and cultural globalization and new technologies on the material conditions for adolescence and youth. We argue that educational systems and government policies are struggling with the consequences of these changes: new forms of identity, technological competence and practice, and new life pathways for children and adolescents. The case is made that the current enthusiasm for early intervention programs is a ‘rhetorical displacement’ that attempts to solve the problems of unruly adolescence and the emergence of the ‘techno-subject’ through an ‘inoculation’ model dedicated to the restoration and preservation of print-based early childhood.

Literacies and libraries - Archives and cybraries

As spatial repositories of dominant and marginalised, residual and emergent cultures, libraries remain key elements in the educational production and reproduction of knowledge and power. As working shrines for those canonical texts of modernity — the dictionary and the encyclopaedia — libraries are sites par excellence for applications of new literacies. This paper aims to redress their omission from the literature on literacy and education. Following a critique of current definitions of information literacy, the paper argues for a critical information literacy for navigation through textual and ideological complexity, diversity, ambiguity, and multiplicity.