Peggy Albers

Semiotic Representations: Building Complex Literacy Practices Through the Arts

Learning to write well often proves to be one of the most difficult areas in the English language arts for young children. However, in these fourth- and fifth-grade language arts classrooms, children are offered opportunities to explore, think through, and express meaning across and within sign systems—in particular, using art, drama, and language. Children engage in arts- and language-based lessons and develop semiotic texts that are richly complex and imaginatively descriptive. Within the teachers semiotic approach to literacy instruction, children develop habits in strategy use and knowledge of and practice in sign systems, both of which help them develop strong literacy practices. Once such experiences become habits of mind, students develop new insights into their own writing, creating, and talking about their texts, as well as the composing process.

Features of gender: An analysis of the visual texts of third grade children:

How do primary students construct understandings of the opposite sex? In what ways do these constructions manifest in the visual texts created in literacy and language arts classrooms? Using visual discourse analysis (Albers, 2007) and scheme analysis (Sonesson, 1988) as interpretive methods, we analyzed the visual texts created by 23 third grade students created at the end of a unit of study in which students explored gender stereotypes. Findings suggest the need for close readings of the graphic, structural, and semantic information conveyed by visual texts that children create in literacy and language arts classes.

From Affinity and Beyond A Study of Online Literacy Conversations and Communities

Digital technologies make possible new avenues for sharing and accessing literacy research and practices worldwide. Among the myriad of options available, web seminars have become popular online learning venues. The current investigation is part of Global Conversations in Literacy Research (GCLR), a longitudinal and qualitative study now in its fifth year. As a critical literacy project, GCLR investigates how a web seminar project uses developing technologies to disseminate innovative literacy research and present professional development that critically shapes literacy practices. With this in mind, the current study seeks to understand the following: (a) What kinds of knowledge sharing interactions (KSIs) occurred in GCLR web seminars focused on critical literacy? and (b) What types of community and social practices occur in web seminars? Data included synchronous chat transcripts from across seven web seminars, interviews with participants and speakers, and website analytics. Data analysis followed the constant comparative method and R, an open-access software that analyzes both qualitative and quantitative data. The study resulted in two findings: Three types of KSIs emerged: whole group, between individual, and smaller, nested affinity groups; and GCLR emerged as a distinct online community with unique social practices. KSIs generated and supported collaborative opportunities to exchange ideas, co-construct knowledge, offer practical classroom applications, and gain insight about important critical literacy issues. As an online networked space that brings together participants interested in critical literacy issues, GCLR represents an innovative type of situated practice with an aim to develop what we call online Networked Spaces of Praxis (oNSP).

Interrupting Situated Practices: Critical Incidents in International Partnerships.

Abstract This paper examines the initial steps of an internationally funded project focused on enhancing teachers’ conceptual and pedagogical knowledge of literacy development in the Western Cape of South Africa. We asked what are the tensions and breakthroughs when engaged in international teacher professional development? Four lines of inquiry support this work: internationalization and production of knowledge, professional development structures, communities of practice, and ethic of care. Resulting themes included initial barriers, localized professional development, and enhancing teacher capacity for change. To explain the themes, we identified four critical incidents. This study has potential to inform the international community of new directions for teacher learning.

When pictures aren’t pretty: Deconstructing punitive literacy practices

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the academic year at challenging moments when he exhibited distressing and/or alienating behaviour. We studied John’s drawings of his misbehaviour, as depicted in these action plans, over the course of 8 months, how they appeared and evolved over the year, and what we learned by doing a close analysis of these visual texts. Specifically, as teacher educators thinking back upon our own experiences as novice teachers, we wanted to know what kinds of practices, such as this discipline action plan, implemented in schools and in our classrooms use literacy practices in a punitive way? Drawing from visual discourse analysis which includes visual design, we attended to how John used colours, the intensity with which they were applied; how he used shape and line (curved, sharp), the size and volume of objects, the relationship among and between objects in the pictures, and the discourses around which he identified. We also looked across these pictures to see how certain objects (teacher, himself, other students) shifted and were retranslated across images and time, and how, collectively, these pictures wrote an ongoing narrative, one that tells a not-so-pretty story of John’s representation of self in these moments. This analysis forces us to problematize the use of multi-modal literacy practices as a punitive endeavour. Encouraging teachers to evaluate critically what ‘behaviour interventions’ actually do to and for students can provide a powerful platform for meaningful change.

‘A whole new world opened up’: the impact of place and space-based professional development on one rural South Africa primary school

ABSTRACT Project Partnerships Achieve Literacy (PAL) South Africa was designed to transform teachers’ pedagogical practices in literacy instruction in an under-resourced school and, by doing so, improve the reading achievement of foundation phase students (Grades R–3). Sociocultural and situative theories of literacy and learning frame the study. To gauge effectiveness of the Project, we undertook a two-year study to examine changes in learners’ literacy growth and teachers’ conceptual and pedagogical knowledge of literacy development as a result of the teachers’ participation in the Project. Given the dual aims of this study, we applied a qualitative dominant mixed methods design. Data analysis revealed three major findings: (1) teachers’ literacy practices shifted toward a more generative and culturally responsive approach ; (2) children’s literacy skills were positively impacted by teachers’ increased literacy pedagogical practices and knowledge; and (3) three characteristics of professional emerged that impacted teachers’ practices. Results indicate that for transformation in pedagogy and ultimately in learners’ literacy achievement, professional development must be placed and spaced, viewed as a process, and valued in a sphere of multiplicity in which social relations and real material practices are ongoing.

Poetic Distillation: Artistic Transcription Analysis in Autoethnographic Literacy Research

As artists and critical literacy scholars, we continually seek out methods that more clearly and accurately reflect not only a way to analyze data, but an analysis that highlighted both the critical and the aesthetic for purposes of expanding and disrupting our commonplace notions of literacy, literacy teaching, and literacy research. We see poetically informed analysis – an area in arts-based qualitative educational research that uses the affordances of poetry to express interpretations of data. Our focus on the arts in literacy research extends beyond their use as objects of study or forms of representation; we seek to use artistic methods in the very analysis of data. To that end, we employ found poetry as an analytic method, creating poetic transcriptions – a process of reading across transcripts to locate key phrasing and recurring motifs. The significance of poetic transcription lay in its metaphoric and imagistic features that permit us to tap into both our literacy and artistic imaginations. Our goal is not to create poetry from our data or to claim ourselves as poets. Instead, we draw upon what we see as poetic impulses in spoken language to look at data through the beginner’s eyes that the arts can make possible.