Karen Dooley

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.

Reconceptualising equity: Pedagogy for Chinese students in Australian schools

Education Queensland’s New Basics project has extended conceptions of ‘equity’ to incorporate dimensions such as higher order thinking and student control of classroom activity. This requires a critique of the outcomes attained by even high achieving students. It is therefore useful to interrogate professional discourses that shape pedagogies for particular groups of students. In this paper, discourses on ‘the Chinese learner’ are reviewed. The review raises new issues of equity because Chinese students are often high achievers in Australian schools, but are frequently criticised for learning in ways that seem to fit uneasily with the types of pedagogy now valorised in Queensland. The paper concludes with a note of caution about the definition of high quality academic outcomes in the new policy, and the effects of a gap between understandings of equity and professional discourses and practice.

Pedagogy and Participation: Literacy Education for Low-Literate Refugee Students of African Origin in a Western School System.

For English as a second language (ESL) teachers working with low-literate adolescents, the challenge is to provide instruction in basic literacy capabilities while also realising the benefits of interactive and dialogic pedagogies advocated for the students. In this article, we look at literacy pedagogy for refugees of African origin in Australian classrooms. We report on an interview study conducted in an intensive English language school for new arrival adolescents and in three regular secondary schools. Brian Streets ideological model is used. From this perspective, literacy entails not only technical skills but also social and cultural ways of making meaning that are embedded within relations of power. The findings showed that teachers were strengthening control of instruction to enable mastery of technical capabilities in basic literacy and genre analysis. We suggest that this approach should be supplemented by a critical approach transforming relations of linguistic power that exclude, marginalise and humiliate the study students in the classroom.

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.

Shaping Australian policy on cultural understandings: alternative approaches to inclusive education

This paper examines Australian national policy documents that have brought together developments in competency‐based education and inclusive curriculum in the formulation of a Key Competency concerned with cultural understandings. Particular attention is given to the definitions of culture and workplace culture, the choice of contexts for the display of cultural understandings as a competency, and the proposed evaluative frameworks. The paper also shows how the documents are variously consonant with the emphases of critical and liberal approaches to culturally inclusive curriculum practice. Finally, consideration is given to the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the cultural understandings competency.

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.

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.

Responsibilising parents: the nudge towards shadow tutoring

Abstract This article considers moral agendas projected onto parents that mobilise them to supplement school literacy education with private tutoring. The theoretical frame draws on the concepts of responsibilisation as emerging market-embedded morality, ‘nudge’ social policies, edu-business and hidden privatisation in education. This framing is applied to two empirical moments: firstly, debates around the Australian government’s ‘Tutorial Voucher Initiative’ of 2004; and secondly, tutoring advertisements and items in school newsletters collected in early 2016. In the first moment, parents were somewhat reluctant to take up free supplementary tutoring; in the second, private literacy tutoring is increasingly normalised and legitimated as parents are nudged to supplement the work of the school.