Beryl Exley

Time, Space, and Text in the Elementary School Digital Writing Classroom

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

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.

Understanding first year university students: personal epistemology and learning

Whilst participation in higher education has increased dramatically over the last two decades, many universities are only now beginning to pay more attention to the learning experiences of first year students. It is important for universities to understand how first year students conceive of learning and knowing in order to promote effective approaches to learning. Even though an extensive body of research demonstrates that beliefs about learning and knowing influence student approaches to learning and learning outcomes, there has been no Australian research that has investigated this critical learner characteristic across first year university students. This paper reports on preliminary data from an ongoing longitudinal study designed to investigate first year students’ beliefs about knowing and learning (epistemological beliefs). Students from teacher education and creative industry faculties in two Australian universities completed the Epistemological Beliefs Survey (EBS) in the first week of their first semester of study. A series of one‐way ANOVA using key demographics as independent variables and the EBS factor scores as dependent variables showed that epistemological beliefs were related to the course of study, previous post‐school education experience, family experience at university, gender, and age. These data help us to understand students’ beliefs about learning and knowing with a view to informing effective learning in higher education.

Social justice and curriculum renewal for Samoan students: an Australian case study

This paper examines the construction of ‘socially just’ curriculum renewal initiatives for Samoan students in a low socio-economic secondary school. Basil Bernsteins concept of recontextualization is used to investigate the implementation of Queenslands Social Justice Strategy at the school level. Interview data provided by the schools first two ‘social justice coordinators’ is analysed, focussing on the categorizations of students and discourses operative within the reform initiatives. Shifts in what counted as socially just curriculum for Samoan students are documented. The focus is on the varying strength of the boundaries of cultural categories (i.e. ‘Samoan’) and on tensions over the emphasis on the cultural knowledge of community representatives and the professional knowledge of school educators. The findings make explicit implications for the distribution of discursive resources to the Samoan students and, hence, life chances in a world in which English is a tool needed by young Australians irrespective of their cultural background.

‘Staying in class so no one can get to him’: a case for the institutional reproduction of ADHD categories and behaviours

This paper focuses a sociological lens on what two early years Australian school boys labelled as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and an early years teacher have to say about social relations within informal play environments. The boys participated in separate semi‐structured interviews where they predicted the likely outcomes of social interactions within informal play environments for a toy puppy that was exhibiting ADHD‐like behaviours. The students forewarned that the puppy should be ‘staying in class so no one can get to him’, and that ‘his friends will be cruel and tease him’, making him into a ‘bad’ puppy. A follow‐up interview with one early years teacher confirmed that the boys’ predictions reflected their lived experiences as students labelled as ADHD in institutional play environments. A theoretical framework based on concepts of social power and control is used to analyse the boys’ and teacher’s interview talk to explain how particular social discourses have the potential to trap students labelled as ADHD into this category and the difficulties one socially aware teacher faced as she tried to disrupt these dominant disabling discourses.

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).

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.

Meanings Emerging in Practice for Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students: An Early Years Multiliteracies Project

Abstract This paper reviews the characteristics of changing education in new times (Castells, 2000, 2001; McNaughton, 2002). It draws attention to the complex nature of teachers’ work when working with linguistically and culturally diverse populations in an era of new literacies and new technologies. Attention is turned to one teacher, Mrs Jessie Alexander (pseudonym), as she implements a multiliteracies project within her culturally and linguistically diverse early-years classroom. The theoretical framework of the analysis draws on international work on student diversity (McNaughton, 2002) designs of meaning and components of pedagogy (New London Group, 1996, 2000; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and knowledge processes within multiliteracies projects (Kalantzis & Cope, 2005) to analyse Jessie’s approach and its outcomes for her diverse student group. This examination highlights both the utility of Jessie’s ‘wide –but not vague’ approach and the robustness of the theorisation of multiliteracies for meeting the needs of this group of 21st century learners.

Afterschool MediaClub: Critical Literacy in a High-Diversity, High-Poverty Urban Setting

In this chapter, we look at critical literacy at MediaClub, a programme of afterschool media production activities for 9- to 12-year-olds. MediaClub was part of the URLearning (URL) research project (2010–2014), which was conducted in a high-diversity, high-poverty elementary school in the state of Queensland, Australia. The Club was designed to skill interested young people up as digital media experts for the literate practices of their homes, communities and classrooms. We anticipated that it would be a space where the receptive and expressive dimensions of critical literacy flourished. Here we look at what happened in practice, drawing implications for literacy education at a time of increasingly prescriptive, if not scripted, pedagogies.

Children’s pedagogic rights in the web 2.0 era: A case study of a child’s open access interactive travel blog

This article examines the web 2.0 blogging experiences of one 8-year-old travel blogger. The research question is centred on ‘What does the interactive function of a web 2.0 blogging experience make available in terms of a child’s pedagogic rights?’ This instrumental case study is made up of 56 written and photographic travel blog posts covering some 11,411 words and 150 photos over 170 days, as well as the 187 replies from external blog participants. Background information about the child, his family and the context of the blogging project is provided via an informal interview with him and his mother. An analytical framework capable of rendering visible what the travel blog project made available in terms of the three pedagogic rights of individual enhancement, the right of social inclusion and the right to political participation is developed and activated. Two core findings emerge. First, in this blogging experience, the pedagogic rights of individual enhancement (80% of posts) and social inclusion (96% of posts) dominated the right to political participation (39% of posts). Second, despite claims that the interactive function of web 2.0 has the potential to boost individualism of meaning-making and action, in this case, the blogging experience did not always manifest itself to capitalise on the transformative potential of this experience for this young child travel blogger.