Jon Callow

Enabling exemplary teaching: a framework of student engagement for students from low socio-economic backgrounds with implications for technology and literacy practices

Engaging students in effective technology use and literacy learning is an ongoing challenge, particularly for students who are impacted by poverty. Exemplary teaching and teachers’ pedagogical choices play a critical role in addressing this challenge. This paper illustrates the practices of teachers, identified to be exemplary in engaging students in low socio-economic status (SES) locations, with a focus on their use of technology and associated literacy practices. The data is drawn from a large-scale study of the practices of 28 exemplary teachers in low SES primary and secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia. Using the Fair Go student engagement framework, we illustrate the ways these teachers used high cognitive, high affective and high operative strategies with technology to build students’ discipline and literacy knowledge, to scaffold their learning and to create a nurturing environment for literacy learning. Technology-literacy markers are presented as a pedagogical guide that draws on exemplary practice by teachers in a range of low SES settings. The analysis presented also provides forward-thinking input to governments and policymakers for re-conceptualizing educational technology for students in these contexts.

A Review of “Re-framing literacy: teaching and learning in English and the language arts”: edited by R. Andrews, New York, Routledge, 2011, xvii + 230 pp., £95.00/

The readers should keep in mind that Appleby’s research is admittedly limited to the voices of white western female teachers about their experiences as foreign aids in development contexts. When discussing issues of inequality in gender, for example, she does not account for the perspectives from non-western, so-called ‘Third World’ local women teachers who might view the white women teachers as the privileged counterpart because of race, ethnicity, economic status, class and language. Nonetheless, Appleby’s book is well theorised and well written, presenting vivid, intriguing and engaging accounts of white women language teachers in development contexts, not so much as ‘agents of change’, but rather as participants in a complex process where multiple trajectories and shifting identities play out in language teaching practice. Overall, many will find this book extremely instrumental in understanding the complex nature of ELT as a contact zone between multiple cultures and communities, not as an apolitical, ahistorical and autonomous enterprise.