Scott Anthony Bulfin

Negotiating Digital Literacy Practices across School and Home: Case Studies of Young People in Australia.

In this paper, we suggest a view of young peoples digital technology use as negotiated social and literate practice. Rather than emphasising the boundedness of school and home spaces and literacy practices, we argue that young peoples practices that develop around their use of digital technologies flow across these spaces, making simple distinctions and binaries about use in each domain problematic. To help illustrate, we present ethnographic case study snapshots of 15–16-year-olds from contrasting schools in and around Melbourne, Australia. In our thinking, we bring together insights from a range of work in the hope of prompting a reframing and rethinking of the relationship between home and school and the other spaces young people inhabit and create. We use Bakhtins ideas about ‘dialogic negotiation’ and Bourdieus notion of habitus to suggest that texts, meanings and practices do not emerge wholly from one social/physical domain but are traced and sourced from the whole life world of experience. In this framing, young peoples engagement with language, learning and technology might be characterised as a dialogic negotiation of a complex range of texts and practices that flow across and between school, home and other spaces.

New literacies as multiply placed practices: expanding perspectives on young people's literacies across home and school

The home–school mismatch hypothesis has played an important part in sociocultural studies of literacy and schooling since the 1970s. In this paper, we explore how this now classic literacy thesis has developed a new life in studies of digital media and electronic communications with regards to young people and schools, what we call the new home–school mismatch hypothesis or new literacy thesis. We report on two studies, one conducted in Australia and the other in Greece, that worked with 14–16-year-old young people to explore the relationships between their use of digital media in- and out-of-school. Our analysis suggests that the relationship between literacy and digital media use in and outside of school is more complex than is often presented in media commentary and in research and points to the need for more careful consideration of the relationship between school and out-of-school practice and knowledge.

Stories: a common currency

This article offers an account of a series of writing workshops involving English teachers in Victoria, Australia, known as the stella2.0 project. It argues that storytelling can potentially provide a valuable counterpoint to the ‘knowledge’ underpinning standards-based reforms. The argument serves to introduce two other essays published in this issue of Changing English: ‘Storytelling and Professional Learning’, in which Brenton Doecke articulates a standpoint about storytelling that helped to shape the workshops, and ‘Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together…’, by Graham Parr and Scott Bulfin, in which they inquire into the conceptual foundations of the stella2.0 project and discuss some of the writing generated by teachers in the workshops.

Nagging, Noobs and New Tricks--Students' Perceptions of School as a Context for Digital Technology Use.

Abstract While digital technology is an integral feature of contemporary education, schools are often presumed to constrain and compromise students’ uses of technology. This paper investigates students’ experiences of school as a context for digital technology use. Drawing upon survey data from three Australian secondary schools (n = 1174), this paper considers the various ways in which students use digital devices and applications “in school” and “for school”. After highlighting trends and differences across a range of digital devices and practices, the paper explores the ways in which students perceive school as a limiting and/or enabling setting for technology use. The findings point to a number of ways that schools act to extend as well as curtail student engagement with technology. This paper concludes by considering the possible ways that schools might work to further support and/or enhance students’ technology experiences.

Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together

Standards-based education reforms and intensified accountability regimes are now a feature of most countries’ agendas to improve the quality of their teaching workforces. One of the direct consequences of these reforms is a requirement that teachers demonstrate their ongoing participation in forms of professional development or professional learning throughout their careers. Along with this, there has been a narrowing of what is acknowledged by standards-based accountability regimes as discipline-based professional knowledge and ‘valuable’ professional development. This essay is a dialogic, reflexive account of a professional learning and writing project for English teachers and teacher educators in Australia, begun in 2013, called the stella2.0 project. The project builds on the groundbreaking work of the STELLA project in Australia from the turn of the century, and some other models of teacher writing projects across the world. Drawing on Cavarero, we critically scrutinize writing and storytelling in the dialogic professional community of the stella2.0 project, and in the process ‘speak back’ to standards-based reform policies that undermine English educators’ agency and professionalism.

On Not Becoming "a Mere Empirical Existence": Exploring "Who" and "What" Narratives in Pre-Service English Teachers' Writing.

Standards-based reforms of education favour narrow forms of teacher professional learning tied to generic standards and pre-determined, measurable outcomes. In high-stakes accountability-driven environments, in schools and initial teacher education programs, educators are rarely encouraged to inquire into their work and professional identities through narrative writing. This article describes and analyses an assessment task in a pre-service teacher education course wherein students explore dialogic forms of critical autobiographical writing as part of an ongoing process of examining and clarifying their views and values about English teaching. Drawing on Cavarero, we argue that the writing these preservice teachers do provides a space for them to negotiate ‘what’ and ‘who’ narratives as they journey to become English teachers. Their writing productively grapples with generic ‘what’ stories such as what standards documents attempt to tell about English teaching, and the ‘unrepeatable uniqueness’ of ‘who’ stories developed out of their individual cultural, educational and linguistic difference.

Examining the Use of Theory within Educational Technology and Media Research.

Academic research in the areas of educational technology and media is often portrayed to be limited in terms of its use of theory. This short paper reports on data collected from a survey of 462 ‘research active’ academic researchers working in the broad area of educational technology and educational media. The paper explores their use (and non-use) of theory.

Exploring school regulation of students’ technology use – rules that are made to be broken?

Schools are highly regulated sites of digital technology use. This article draws upon survey data from students (n = 1174) across three Australian secondary schools, examining their experiences and perceptions of school regulation of technology use, as well as the ways in which students accommodate and/or work around such constraints. The data highlight a number of different forms of regulation that students perceive as impeding their in-school engagement with technology – most notably relating to filtering/blocking of content; (dis)possession of personal devices; enforced uses and standardized practices. Conversely, a number of tactics of contestation are also highlighted – including surreptitious uses of digital media; low-level “hacks” and technical reconfigurations; and various other forms of subversion. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings, and the need for school authorities to work with students to develop negotiated forms of regulation that support expansive and increasingly personalized uses of technology within the school context.

Left to their own devices: the everyday realities of one-to-one classrooms

Abstract The past decade has seen the expansion of personal digital technologies into schools. With many students and teachers now possessing smartphones, tablets, and laptops, schools are initiating one-to-one and ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies aiming to make use of these ‘personal devices’ in classrooms. While often discussed in terms of possible educational benefits and/or organisational risks, the actual presence of personal devices in schools tends to be more mundane in nature and effect. Drawing upon ethnographic studies of three Australian high schools, this paper details ways in which the proliferation of digital devices has come to bear upon everyday experiences of school. In particular, the paper highlights the ways in which staff and students negotiate (in)appropriate technology engagement; the ordinary (rather than extraordinary) ways that students make use of their devices in classrooms; and the device-related tensions now beginning to arise in schools. Rather than constituting a radically ‘transformational’ form of schooling, the paper considers how the heightened presence of personal technologies is becoming subsumed into existing micro-politics of school organisation and control.

Literacy Teacher Education and New Technologies

Systematization comes upon the scene during an age which feels itself in command with a ready-made and handed down body of authoritative thought. A creative age must first have passed; then and only then does the business of formalistic systematizing begin – an undertaking typical of heirs and epigones who feel themselves in possession of someone else’s now voiceless word.