Barbara Comber

Getting Out of Deficit: Pedagogies of reconnection

The fact that children growing up in poverty are likely to be in the lower ranges of achievement on standardised literacy tests is not a new phenomenon. Internationally there are a myriad of intervention and remedial programmes designed to address this problem with a range of effects. Frequently, sustainable reforms are curtailed by deficit views of families and children growing up in poverty. This article describes an ongoing research study entitled “Teachers Investigate Unequal Literacy Outcomes: Cross‐Generational Perspectives”, which made teacher researchers central in examining this long‐standing dilemma. It outlines the research design and rationale, and analyses how two early career teachers worked their ways out of deficit analyses of two children they were most worried about. It argues that disrupting deficit discourses and re‐designing new pedagogical repertoires to reconnect with childrens lifeworlds is a long‐term project that can best be achieved in reciprocal research relationships with teachers.

Teachers’ work and pedagogy in an era of accountability

A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace related. In this paper we discuss the work of middle school teachers in low-socioeconomic communities from their perspectives. Referring to reflective interviews, meeting transcripts and an electronic reporting template, we examine how teacher participants in a school reform project describe their work – what they emphasise and what they down-play or omit. Using Foucaultian approaches to critical discourse analysis and insights from Dorothy Smiths (2005) Institutional Ethnography, we consider the ‘discursive economy’ (Carlson, 2005) in teachers’ reported experiences of their everyday practices in northern suburbs schools in South Australia in which a democratic progressive discourse exists alongside corporate and disciplinary discourses.

Researching for Social Justice: Contextual, Conceptual and Methodological Challenges.

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with ‘crisis’ conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the ‘productive pedagogies’ and the ‘unofficial curriculum’ of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights.

I am smart and I am not joking: Aiming High in the Middle Years of Schooling

In this paper, we draw on accounts from students to inform a Middle Schooling movement that has been variously described as “arrested”, “unfinished” and “exhausted”. We propose that if the Middle Schooling movement is to understand the changing worlds of students and develop new approaches in the middle years of schooling, then it is important to draw on the insights that individual students can provide by conducting research with “students-as-informants”. The early adolescent informants to this paper report high hopes for their futures (despite their lower socioeconomic surroundings), which reinforces the importance of supporting successful learner identities and highlights the role of schooling in the decline of adolescent student aspirations. However, their insights did not stop at the individual learner, with students also identifying cultural and structural constraints to reform. As such, we argue that students may be both an important resource for inquiry into individual school reform and for the Middle Schooling movement internationally.

Getting the Big Picture: Regulating Knowledge in the Early Childhood Literacy Curriculum.

As part of the Commonwealth’s drive to enhance Australia’s competitiveness in the global economy, Australia is five years from implementing ‘National Benchmarks’ to leverage measurable literacy outcomes from schools. This ‘back to basics’ agenda is in tension with another drive to foster advanced thinking skills in children. Teachers are being positioned as deskilled technicians on the one hand and model ‘new economy’ workers on the other, whilst working to meet the needs of diverse student populations. This article discusses the impact of these tensions on ‘Riverside Primary School’ located in a culturally diverse, socio-economically disadvantaged suburb of Adelaide. A case study of student–teacher interactions during a literacy lesson is used to illustrate how dominant educational and political discourses operate at a classroom level to construct children as ‘normal’, ‘gifted’ or ‘slow’.

Looking Beyond ‘Skills’ and ‘Processes’: Literacy as Social and Cultural Practices in Classrooms

This article explores the thinking and research that has led to a view of literacy as social and cultural practices. Literacy is described not as an internal cognitive state or a universal set of skills and processes that individuals must learn, but as social and cultural ways of doing things through the use of text. This view adds to our understanding of literacy by switching the focus to the ways in which individuals, groups, communities and societies put literate practices to work. For teachers, this means thinking about the sorts of literacies they are trying to produce through their programmes. This implies studying classrooms and preschools as social and cultural settings where particular practices count as good work – asking which kinds of texts, ways of talking, reading, writing and behaving are preferred and why.

Pedagogy as Work: Educating the Next Generation of Literacy Teachers

What do new teachers need to know about literacy and how to teach it? Given the changing demographics of the teaching and teacher education workforce, the changing populations of young people, and the changing nature of literacy, what counts as essential pedagogical knowledge is increasingly open to question. In the midst of such complexity, many governments are taking a stronger position on normative standards for literacy and teacher training. Publishers have moved in to play key roles in the professional development of teachers on authorised approaches. The insider knowledge of generations of teachers is now under threat as large percentages of the teaching population head for retirement. In this article I argue that we need to radically rethink teacher education. Taking the case of literacy, I demonstrate the kinds of pressures and doubts experienced by many teachers about their knowledge and practice. I offer some recommendations for educating the next generation of literacy teachers, which are informed by historical, political, demographic, and futures analyses of the contemporary scene.

Making Space for Place-Making Pedagogies: Stretching Normative Mandated Literacy Curriculum

In an era of normative standardised literacy curriculum continuing to make space for culturally responsive literacy pedagogy is on ongoing challenge for early childhood educators. Collaborative participatory research and ethnographic studies of teachers who accomplish innovative and inclusive early childhood education in culturally diverse high poverty communities is urgent for the profession. Such pedagogies involve complex understandings of the cultural and political histories, and the dynamic potential, of the places in which school communities are located. By incorporating the study of local histories and biographies and researching neighbourhood changes teachers adapt mandated curriculum to maintain community knowledges and allow for positive identity work at the same time as they meet the authorised systems objectives. When teachers work with children as co-researchers through the study of peoples lives in particular places and times, the community and its complex histories become a rich resource for young peoples literacy repertoires.

International Handbook of Research on Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture

The International Handbook of Research in Childrens Literacy, Learning and Culture presents an authoritative distillation of current global knowledge related to the field of primary years literacy studies. Features chapters that conceptualize, interpret, and synthesize relevant research Critically reviews past and current research in order to influence future directions in the field of literacy Offers literacy scholars an international perspective that recognizes and anticipates increasing diversity in literacy practices and cultures

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.