Christopher Walsh

Literacy in the digital age: Learning from computer games

Abstract The need for literacy and the English curriculum to attend to digital literacies in the twenty‐first century is well established. Although studies in digital literacies have examined the inclusion of computer games in schools, there has not been an extended study of English teachers incorporating computer games into their teaching and learning through action research projects. This paper outlines the structure and progress of a research project exploring the uses of computer games in English classrooms. We argue that much can be learned about the teaching of both print and digital literacies from examining computer games and young people’s engagement in online digital culture in the world beyond school.

The ‘trainer in your pocket’: mobile phones within a teacher continuing professional development program in Bangladesh

Examples of mobile phones being used with teachers to provide continuing professional development (CPD) in emerging economies at scale are largely absent from the research literature. We outline English in Action’s (EIA) model for providing 80,000 teachers with CPD to improve their communicative language teaching in Bangladesh over nine years. EIA’s CPD program is delivered face to face and supported through open distance learning (ODL). This innovative model of teacher CPD is supported through peer learning and self-study using a variety of print, audio and video resources. Drawing on the success of EIA’s pilot studies, where internal and external evaluation reported significant improvement in teachers’ and students’ English-language competence after one year, the current phase is using low-cost mobile phones, or the ‘trainer in your pocket’ to deliver CPD to 12,500 teachers through 2015. We believe EIA’s teacher CDP model is best suited to assist the project in achieving one of its primary goals: to increase the English-language proficiency of 12 million students, allowing them to access greater social and economic opportunities in the future. We argue EIA’s use of mobile phones for the provision of teacher CPD – at scale – is timely and replicable in both developed and developing contexts.

Hybridity, globalisation, and literacy education in the context of New York City's Chinatown

Although multiliteracies have been well theorised in recent years, few studies have researched the practical aspects of developing a curriculum of multiliteracies. This article examines multiliteracies as a crossdisciplinary curriculum practice, drawing on data from a 3-year study in an urban middle school. The data show possibilities for students to engage in critique and to move toward designing multimodal texts. Using Bourdieusian concepts of social capital and academic field, we explore the struggles around learning to inhabit certain school discourses.

Leveraging Low-Cost Mobile Technologies in Bangladesh: A Case Study of Innovative Practices for Teacher Professional Development and Communicative English Language Teaching

Using mobile technologies, particularly mobile phones, for teacher professional development in developing economies is extremely rare. This article presents a case study of English in Action (EIA) and its use of mobile technologies that moves beyond documenting their functionality as ubiquitous handheld hardware to enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning. It presents compelling evidence of an effective and innovative professional development intervention that simultaneously improves communicative English language teaching. We argue this large-scale intervention was significant in enhancing teachers’ professional knowledge and presents important implications for using mobile phones in developing countries for teacher professional development and classroom-based English teaching and learning.

Transforming e‐democracy for equity and social justice: We Decide

Purpose – The purpose of editorial to this special issue is this to introduce “We Decide”, a grassroots e‐democracy learnscape. This timely collaborative initiative was conceptualized to promote the deployment of internet communication technologies (ICTs) for advancing social justice and equity in an increasingly digitized era. The special issue presents six individually selected papers delivered at the IADIS International Conference e‐democracy, Equity and Social Justice held in Rome, Italy, 20‐22 July 2011. These papers provide examples of unique innovations that highlight new possibilities and directions for e‐democracy that are grounded in an ethos of greater equity and social justice.Design/methodology/approach – The authors outline the mission and approach of “We Decide” and how it can be understood in the evolution of e‐democracy.Findings – The authors discuss how the six papers in this special issue suggest ways to transform e‐democracy towards equity and social justice.Research limitations/implic...

Strengthening access to justice through clinical legal education (CLE)

Purpose – Building local capacity to protect public health and promote social justice with stigmatized populations disproportionately at risk of HIV infection is difficult regardless of context. The purpose of this paper is to document an international collaborations approaches to integrate sexual rights and community legal education into two HIV online peer outreach and prevention (OPOP) programs in Chiang Mai, Thailand.Design/methodology/approach – This paper documents an international collaborations approaches to integrate sexual rights and community legal education into two HIV online outreach and prevention programs (OPOP) in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The projects goal was to increase access to justice alongside HIV prevention and education.Findings – The paper illustrates how a clinical legal education (CLE) externship clinic can provide an opportunity for law students and advocates for justice to make an authentic contribution to assisting others, very different from themselves, in overcoming legal ...

The Potential of Mobile Phones to Transform Teacher Professional Development to Build Sustainable Educational Futures in Bangladesh

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world’s largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project’s greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result EIA is currently using a mobile phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit—known as the ‘trainer in your pocket’—to foster a ‘quiet revolution’ in the provision of teacher professional development at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and 10 million students.

Response to Bettina Fabos

We thank the Pedagogies editors for publishing Fabos’s response and offering us a chance to reflect in kind on her reading of our article. We agree with many of her observations. Perhaps some brief clarifications are in order before we take up the substantive issues she raises in her critique. We hope to contribute some interesting lines of speculation and inquiry for readers of this issue and to justify the editors’ invitation to have this dialogue. We appreciate the reviewer’s positive assessment of our attempt to affect the trajectory of new literacy studies (NLS). NLS, in its formative works (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984), posited literacy as multiple and social (ideological) as opposed to singular, private, or individual (autonomous). Since then, NLS research has focused on the social and cultural (and sometimes historical, political, and economic) aspects in which literate practices are situated. For the past 30 years, NLS has provided a rich line of inquiry for research in the myriad ways diverse groups of people make sense of their local worlds. Our work is intended to extend and to problematise previous NLS work by theorising how an understanding of globalisation affects an understanding of our Chinese American students’ hybrid identities and literacies. We also appreciate Fabos’s contention that NLS’s celebration of the “local” has belied its earlier, possibly more radical, promise by attending to what she calls “‘safe’ areas of practice and process” (Fabos, 2006, p. 243). We tried to move outPEDAGOGIES: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, 1(4), 247–252 Copyright