Luigi Iannacci

Biomedical Approaches to Literacy: Two Curriculum Teachers Challenge the Treatment of Dis/Ability in Contemporary Early Literacy Education

This paper is a critical examination of the state of Canadian literacy education and research and its effects on young children. Its purpose is to appraise the ways in which disability is currently being produced and practiced in early school curricula and to argue for a theoretically rich curricula which begins from children’s strengths. To accomplish these goals, this paper commences with a brief appraisal of curriculum studies’ lack of attention to issues of dis/ability, considers major movements in literacy curricula, then contends that an innovation in literacy curricula the authors term, “the biomedical approach”, is pathologizing entire school populations and inflicting upon them reductionistic literacy curricula. This paper illustrates the biomedical approach through a narrative of a public school and the experiences of its early years staff and students.

Every Day He Has a Dream to Tell: Classroom Literacy Curriculum in a Full-Day Kindergarten.

Within an era of change to early childhood education and care, this case study of kindergarten classroom literacy curricula sought to understand the production and effects of the curriculum within one urban, Canadian full-day kindergarten that included culturally and linguistically diverse children. Central was a concern for the place of children’s interests and funds of knowledge within this production and what opportunities the curriculum provided for children’s literacy and identity options. Theoretically, the study drew on actor-network theory and multiliteracies. Using ethnographic tools, the study found that the curriculum diverged significantly from what might have been expected. It was comprised of literacy events characterized by educator attempts to control a dynamic classroom through the management of the children’s bodies and voices. Findings suggest that this constrained children from being curricular informants and limited their literacy and identity options. Major actors in the network that produced the classroom literacy curriculum were class size, materials and space with a surprising relative absence of the programmatic curriculum and assessment. The case demonstrates what can happen when a network of actors come together and other actors are not in place to promote literacy curricula that create opportunities to expand children’s communication and identity options.

Co-Constructed by Design: Knowledge Processes in a Fluid “Cloud Curriculum”

Two concurrent trends converge in contemporary education: the first acknowledges educational activities as social and situated prompting us to imagine new roles for community in teaching and learning; the second attends to our abilities to differentiate and individualize activities, to be responsive to learner needs. Multiliteracies theorists contend that learning can be understood as a process of “weaving” backward and forward across and between different pedagogical moves. Using “knowledge processes” as a theoretical lens, we explore the pedagogical moves possible when we take an award winning curricular approach to teaching Shakespeare and work with it in the context of a dynamic “cloud”; a generative, flexible and participatory space where learners, educators and developers are integral to the process of “curriculum making. ” We offer examples of the multiple opportunities for the pedagogies of “new teacher” and “new learning” to emerge when a space for invention is created.

Intersections between and understandings of literacy and disability in a B.Ed program: Discourses, tensions and curriculum

This study contributes to the growing body of research that seeks to destabilize dominant notions of literacy and disability. In particular, we explore teacher candidates’ understandings and constructions of literacy and children with “special needs”, or children identified as having a “learning disability”, before and after they complete their kindergarten-grade six teacher certification (B.Ed). We examine how dominant discourses of dis/ability present themselves in these teacher candidates’ initial and subsequent understandings, and how courses and a tutoring practicum can and cannot work to open up new ideas about literacy and dis/ability. Our intention is to add to the discussions of literacy education and curriculum informed by sociocultural and critical disability theory. This study highlights the connections between literacy and dis/ability as they intersect and are inextricably intertwined throughout the discourses and tensions seen in the data.

Reconceptualizing Accountability: The Ethical Importance of Expanding Understandings of Literacy and Assessment for Twenty-First-Century Learners

A multiliteracies perspective that views accountability as an ethical imperative that is respectful of and responsive to the semiotic diversity within classrooms repositions accountability as responsibility to students, parents and the communities to which they belong. This responsibility focuses on ensuring that the various assets and communication and identity options students have and bring with them to school are accessed, valued, and fostered. This chapter explores what is necessary to reposition literacy and assessment in order for ethical, responsive, and semiotically rich pedagogies and curricula to develop within the current educational climate.

Helping out, signing up and sitting down: The cultural production of “read-alouds” in three kindergarten classrooms:

Reading aloud to children is a ubiquitous practice in early childhood settings. While there are many recommendations for how educators should conduct these experiences, little research in the past decade has examined how read-alouds are actually accomplished. Using anthropological and sociological theories of learning, literacy and research, our analysis illustrates how read-alouds are enacted in three kindergarten classrooms. Our analysis highlights similarities and differences in how these phenomena are produced and raises questions about the consequences current ideologies of literacy learning may have for young children’s understandings of reading and of themselves as readers. Differences amongst the research sites are discussed in light of Cummins’ continuum of coercive and transformational curricula.