Annette Woods

Learning to be literate : issues of pedagogy for recently arrived refugee youth in Australia

This paper focuses on issues of access to productive literacy learning as part of socially just schooling for recently arrived refugee youth within Australia. It argues that a sole reliance on traditional ESL pedagogy is failing this vulnerable group of students, who differ significantly from past refugees who have settled in Australia. Many have been ‘placeless’ for some time, are likely to have received at best an interrupted education before arriving in Australia, and may have experienced significant trauma (Christie & Sidhu, 2006; Cottone, 2004; Miller, Mitchell, & Brown, 2005). Australian Government policy has resulted in spacialized settlement, leaving particular schools dealing with a large influx of refugee students who may be attending school for the first time (Centre for Multicultural Youth Issues, 2004; Sidhu & Christie, 2002). While this has implications generally, it has particular consequences for secondary school students attempting to learn English literacy in short periods of time, without basic foundations in either English or print-based literacy in any first language (Centre for Multicultural Youth Issues, 2006). Many of these students leave schools without the most basic early literacy practices, having endured several years of pedagogy pitched well beyond their needs. This paper suggests that schools must take up three key roles: to educate, to provide a site for the development of civic responsibility, and to act as a site for welfare with responsibility.

Comprehension as Social and Intellectual Practice: Rebuilding Curriculum in Low Socioeconomic and Cultural Minority Schools

This article reframes the concept of comprehension as a social and intellectual practice. It reviews current approaches to reading instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse, indigenous and low socioeconomic students (SES), noting an emphasis on comprehension as autonomous skills. The four resources model (Freebody & Luke, 1990) is used to make the case for integrating comprehension instruction with an emphasis on student cultural and community knowledge, and substantive intellectual and sociocultural content in elementary school curricula. Illustrations are drawn from our research on literacy in a low SES primary school.

School Leadership, Literacy and Social Justice : The Place of Local School Curriculum Planning and Reform

School reform is a matter of both redistributive social justice and recognitive social justice. Following Fraser (Justice interruptus: critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. Routledge, New York, 1997), we begin from a philosophical and political commitment to the more equitable redistribution of knowledge, credentials, competence, and capacity to children of low socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic minority and Indigenous communities whose access, achievement, and participation historically have “lagged” behind system norms and benchmarks set by middle class and dominant culture communities. At the same time, we argue that the recognition of these students and their communities’ lifeworlds, knowledges, and experiences in the curriculum, in classroom teaching, and learning is both a means and an end: a means toward improved achievement measured conventionally and a goal for reform and alteration of mainstream curriculum knowledge and what is made to count in the school as valued cultural knowledge and practice. The work that we report here was based on an ongoing 4-year project where a team of university teacher educators/researchers have partnered with school leadership and staff to build relationships within community. The purpose has been to study whether and how engagement with new digital arts and multimodal literacies could have effects on students “conventional” print literacy achievement and, secondly, to study whether and how the overall performance of a school could be generated through a focus on professional conversations and partnerships in curriculum and instruction – rather than the top-down implementation of a predetermined pedagogical scheme, package, or approach.

Literacy teacher research in high poverty schools: Why it matters

Teachers who work in contexts in which their students’ lives are affected by poverty take up the challenge of learning to teach diverse students in ways that teachers in other contexts may not be required to do. And they do this work in contexts of immense change. Students’ communities change, neighborhoods change, educational policies change, literate practices, and the specific effects of what it means to be poor in particular places also change. What cannot change is a commitment to high-equity, high-quality education for the students in these schools. Teachers need to analyze situations and make ongoing ethical decisions about pedagogy and curriculum. To do this, they must be able to continuously gauge the effects of their practices on different students. Hence, we argue that building teacher-researcher dispositions and repertoires is a key goal for teacher education across the teaching life-span. Drawing on a range of recent and ongoing collaborative research projects in schools situated in areas of high poverty, we draw out some principles for literacy teachers’ education.

Early intervention: narratives of learning, discipline and enculturation

Current understandings about literacy have moved away from the belief that literacy is simply a process that individuals do in their heads. These understandings do not negate the importance of the individual aspects of literacy learning, but they emphasize understandings of literacy as a social practice. In many cases, responses to early literacy intervention seem to be grounded in theories that appear out of step with current literacy research and consequent evidence that literacy is socially and culturally constructed. One such response is the Reading Recovery programme based on Clay’s theory of literacy acquisition. Clay (1992) describes the programme as a second chance to learn. However, others have suggested that programmes like Reading Recovery may in fact work toward the marginalization of particular groups, thereby helping to maintain the status quo along class, gender and ethnic lines. This article allows two professionals to bring their insider’s knowledge of Reading Recovery to an analysis of the construction of the programme. The article interweaves this analysis with the personal narratives of the researchers as they negotiated the borders between different understandings and beliefs about literacy and literacy pedagogy.

Personal epistemology in pre-service teachers : belief changes throughout a teacher education course

Classrooms of the 21st century are complex systems. They support diverse learners from varied contexts and function in a “messy” bricolage of policy contexts. This complexity is also evident in the nature of teaching and learning deployed in these classrooms. There is also, in current contexts, a general expectation that teachers will support students to construct, rather than simply receive knowledge. This process of constructing knowledge requires a focus on critical thinking in complex social and real world contexts (see also Elen & Clarebout, 2001; Yang, Chang & Hsu 2008). Critical thinking, which involves the identification and evaluation of multiple perspectives when making decisions, is a process of knowing – a tool of wisdom (Kuhn & Udell, 2001). Schommer-Aikens, Bird and Bakken (2010) refer to classrooms that encourage critical thinking as “epistemologically based” in which “the teacher encourages his/her students to look for connections among concepts within the text, with their prior knowledge, and with concepts found in the world beyond themselves” (p. 48).

Teaching sociology within teacher education: Revisiting, realigning and re-embedding

This article uses theoretical resources from the sociology of education to consider the teaching of sociology in teacher education programs in Australia. Once a disciplinary ‘pillar’ of teacher education, sociology’s contribution has become less explicit while more integrated, with consequences for disciplinary identity. Here we explore how sociology is taught in teacher education curricula on two fronts. First we outline how sociology is embedded as one of a number of competing perspectives in foundational studies, and its pedagogic consequences. Then we consider the powerful contribution of sociology in literacy studies, amidst public debate about literacy performance. The analysis draws on Bernstein’s distinction between singular disciplinary curriculum design and practically oriented regional curriculum design. We seek to trouble the common-sense binary between theory and practice that structures debates around professional education in higher education more broadly, and to dignify service sociology as a valuable, generative site for the discipline’s future.

Thinking Critically in the Land of Princesses and Giants : The Affordances and Challenges of Critical Approaches in the Early Years

Contents Foreword Jerome C. Harste Preface 1. Introduction: Making the Road by Talking: Moving Critical Literacies Forward Jessica Zacher Pandya & JuliAnna Avila Section I. Theoretical Frameworks and Arguments for Critical Literacy 2. Defining Critical Literacy Allan Luke 3. The Importance of Critical Literacy Hilary Janks 4. Unrest in Grosvenor Square: Preparing for Power in Elite Boarding Schools, Working-Class Public Schools, and Socialist Sunday Schools Patrick J. Finn Section II. Critiquing Critical Literacy in Practice 5. Thinking critically in the land of princesses and giants: The affordances and challenges of critical approaches in the early years Beryl Exley, Annette Woods & Karen Dooley 6. Where Poems Hide: Finding Reflective, Critical Spaces inside Writing Workshop Amy Flint & Tasha Tropp Laman 7. Critical Literacy Across the Curriculum: Learning to read, question and re-write designs Barbara Comber & Helen Nixon 8. Looking and Listening for Critical Literacy: Recognizing Ways Youth Perform Critical Literacy in School Elisabeth Johnson & Lalitha Vasudevan 9. Communities as Counter-storytelling (Con)texts: The Role of Community-Based Educational Institutions in the Development of Critical Literacy and Transformative Action Enid Rosario-Ramos & Laura Johnson Section III. Revisions of Critical Literacy 10. Text Complexity: The Battle for Critical Literacy in the Common Core State Standards Michael Moore, Don Zancanella & JuliAnna Avila 11. What Counts as Critical Literacy in the Japanese Context: Its Possibilities and Practical Approaches Under the Global-National Curriculum Shinya Takekawa 12. Standardizing, and Erasing, Critical Literacy in High-Stakes Settings Jessica Zacher Pandya 13. Inquiry into the Incidental Unfolding of Social Justice Issues: 20 Years of Seeking Out Possibilities for Critical Literacies Vivian Maria Vasquez 14. Conclusion: Affective and Global Ecologies: New Directions for Critical Literacy Cynthia Lewis List of Contributors IndexDuring the last four decades, educators have created a range of critical literacy approaches for different contexts, including compulsory schooling (Luke & Woods, 2009) and second language education (Luke & Dooley, 2011). Despite inspirational examples of critical work with young students (e.g., O’Brien, 1994; Vasquez, 1994), Comber (2012) laments the persistent myth that critical literacy is not viable in the early years. Assumptions about childhood innocence and the priorities of the back-to-basics movement seem to limit the possibilities for early years literacy teaching and learning. Yet, teachers of young students need not face an either/or choice between the basic and critical dimensions of literacy. Systematic ways of treating literacy in all its complexity exist. We argue that the integrative imperative is especially important in schools that are under pressure to improve technical literacy outcomes. In this chapter, we document how critical literacy was addressed in a fairytales unit taught to 4.5 - 5.5 year olds in a high diversity, high poverty Australian school. We analyze the affordances and challenges of different approaches to critical literacy, concluding they are complementary rather than competing sources of possibility. Furthermore, we make the case for turning familiar classroom activities to critical ends.

‘These Are My Photos of When I Was Little’: Locating Media Arts in the Primary School Curriculum

‘Media arts’ has been included as a fifth area of the arts for the new Australian Curriculum which will become mandatory learning for all Australian children from pre-school to Year Six (Y6) from 2014. The current curriculum design is underpinned by an approach familiar to media educators who combine creative practice and critical response to develop students’ media literacies. Media arts within the Australian Curriculum will place Australia at the forefront of international efforts to promote media education as an entitlement for all children. Even with this mandated endorsement, however, there remains ongoing debate about where to locate media education in school curricula. Historically, media education in Australia has been approached through diverse curriculum activities at the secondary school level. These include the critical literacy objectives of subject English; vocationally oriented media and technology education or ICTs education; and Arts courses using new media technologies for creativity. In this chapter we consider the possibilities and challenges for media arts, specifically for primary school student learning. We draw on empirical evidence from a research project that has trialled a media arts curriculum with students attending a primary school in a low socio-economic status (SES) and culturally diverse community on the outskirts of Brisbane, Queensland.

Curriculum and syllabus design

The terms curriculum and syllabus are often conflated within education. This has lead to a situation where the debates in the field of curriculum have ignored important ground related to the technical form of syllabus documents - the categories, grids, shape, structure and purposes of the syllabus – instead tending to focus on cultural and ideological debates about content. Two fields: English language teaching and higher education have dealt with issues of syllabus design, but little work related to school system syllabus has been completed. For a system to achieve high quality and high equity an effective balance of professionalism and prescription must be achieved, with the form of the syllabus playing a key role in setting the level of specification and locus of control and authority required.