Through a gender lens: explaining North‐Eastern Thai women’s participation in adult literacy education

This ethnographic study employs a gender perspective to understand the motivations of eight women literacy learners participating in a village‐based functional literacy programme in rural North‐eastern Thailand. Field research took place over six months of periodic residence in a North‐eastern Thai village, and involved participant observation, individual interviews and informal focus groups. An analysis of the women’s reproductive, productive and community roles, and their practical and strategic gender needs (Moser ) is used to frame findings on the women’s participation in the literacy programme. In brief, although the women valued educational programmes that reduced the burden of their reproductive labour, offered income‐generating opportunities in their productive roles and supported their leadership roles in the community, the village literacy programme had limited effect in addressing these practical gender needs. However, because a patriarchal ideology and Buddhist institutions had denied the women access to schooling as children, they now saw the literacy programme as both a symbolic return to school and a collective women’s space to advocate for more desirable adult educational programmes. In these ways, the programme addressed their strategic gender needs. The study argues that a gender lens is critical in explaining women’s participation in literacy programmes and in designing literacy education for development.     

Early childhood literacy: Creating a better world

Abstract

Problem‐posing teaching using multicultural children's literature nourishes an integrated literacy curriculum that supports young children's meaningful learning. This method encourages integrated learning that is both developmentally and culturally meaningful through interacting with story, reading literature, and participating in related learning activities. The problem‐posing method was developed by Paulo Freire [Education for Critical Consciousness, Seabury, New York] and critical pedagogists. The method leads students of any age, experience or ability level to base new learning on personal experience in a way that encourages critical reflection. This method has not been widely used with younger learners, but lends itself well to integrated early childhood literacy development.

This article shows selected qualitative data samples from case studies of early childhood teacher education students as they experience the method in a literacy course and as they use the method with young children. A critical analysis of the students’ work draws out key points regarding literacy development in a rapidly changing world. The teacher education students’ work provides an arena for developing the theory further as they implement theoretically‐based pedagogy with young learners. Data reveal issues regarding critical literacies and postmodern approaches to early childhood education.     

The Use of Story in Critical Literacy Practice

Story-telling and story-writing as pedagogical practices hold a pre-eminent place within critical literacy practices. In Toronto, Canada's largest city, progressive community-based literacy programmes begin the educational process by assisting adult literacy students to learn to read and write by using the language experience method. The educational process is furthered when the programmes publish the autobiographical accounts that these learners have created. They publish these accounts as a way of generating relevant educational reading texts for adult new readers, and more significantly as a form of cultural expression for people marginalised by poverty. Elaine Gaber-Katz, a feminist educator literacy practitioner, explores how critical literacy programmes purposefully seek out the voices of those who have been silenced. She also explores the ways in which these programmes create the spaces for these voices to be heard. Focusing on the use of story, the author assesses the value of publishing these kinds of learners' stories and confronts some of its inherent limitations.     

Rethinking emancipation with Freire and Rancière: A plea for a thing-centred pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation.     

Learning to be critically reflective: exploring fiction writing and adult learning

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with fiction writers, ways in which critical reflection may be encouraged in connection to reading and writing fiction are taken up by exploring three different thematic areas that relate to a Habermasian framework of knowledge constitutive approaches to learning. These different areas can be categorised as (a) technical-rational, (b) humanistic and (c) critical or emancipatory. The first of these considers critical reflection as a way to develop technical capacities as a creative writer. The next section takes up a humanistic framework to explore the value of individual and collective learning opportunities to enhance personal growth and critical reflection. The third area of discussion considers a deeper critical or emancipatory framework of learning through critical reflection which may lead to social change. The paper concludes by considering the value of arts-informed adult education approaches, such as those related to fiction writing, to enhance the development of critical reflection amongst adult learners.     

Awakening Teachers’ Capacities for Social Justice With/In Arts-Based Inquiries

Social justice-oriented teacher education can guide preservice teachers toward greater critical sociocultural knowledge, analytic skills, social responsibility, and commitment to act in the interest of providing all students with high quality educational experiences. This qualitative case study examines how arts-based inquiries in social justice-oriented teacher education can provide the necessary generative spaces for developing preservice teachers’ critical sociocultural knowledge. Data were drawn from student interviews and reflective papers across four sections of a course employing collaborative, arts-based inquiry. Findings highlight the cumulative knowledge, pleasure, anxiety, confrontation with material and symbolic bodies, and self-transformations that can develop from art practices and help to awaken preservice teachers’ critical consciousness for teaching for social justice.     

Challenging ideological environments: international teachers’ experiences in an outside-of-country teacher training programme

Teacher training for developing nation contexts is often conducted in short, intensive inside and outside-of-country programmes. Concerns have been raised in relation to the uncritical take-up of the western-centric material provided by these programmes, which are usually funded by national and international government organizations. This paper explores an approach used in an outside-of-country teacher training programme funded by an Australian government grant. The research focused on teacher trainers from the Monastic education system and their reflections on whether critical literacy approaches could be incorporated into curriculum in Myanmar. It used a Bakhtinian framework to analyse the teacher trainers’ ideological environments and their hybridizations of critical literacy discourses for their own contexts. It was found that while the teacher trainers were passionate about the worth of developing critical literacy skills for their teachers and pupils, they struggled with a range of constraints that existed for them within their country. The research illustrated the importance of providing spaces for participants in programmes such as these to critically reflect on the relevance of non-government organization (NGO) and international non-government organization (INGO) training programmes, especially in light of the multiple challenges that are a part of their everyday lives.     

Learning,literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

The impact of participation in adult literacy programmes on learners’ identities is examined through an interrogation of their past and current experiences and the assessment of the effect of particular pedagogies. The findings show how learners’ positive experiences in their programmes had caused them to re-evaluate their previous understandings and enabled the construction of new identities as people that are able to learn. These changes had come about through the challenging of negative discourses, the creation of new figured worlds and imagined futures, and the use of a learning curriculum where learners’ experiences were utilized as positive resources.     

Life skills for ‘real life’: How critical thinking is contextualised across vocational programmes

Background: This article presents an analysis of how critical thinking is contextualised in everyday teaching in three vocational education and training (VET) programmes: Vehicle and transport, Restaurant and management, and Health and social care.

Purpose: The main question addressed is: What knowledge discourses permeate different VET-contexts, and hence what kinds of opportunities for critical thinking do they offer students?

Method: The qualitative analysis draws on data from a four-year ethnographic project exploring learning processes that can be characterised as civic education in Swedish vocational education. The analysis presented here used data collected during 85 days of observations of teaching in six VET classes, interviews with 81 students and 10 teachers, and collected teaching material. To explore why some contextualisations provided more opportunities and encouragement for critical thinking than others, we applied Bernsteinian concepts of ‘horizontal and vertical knowledge discourses’ and ‘discursive gaps’.

Findings and conclusions: Overall, teaching that was observed focused primarily on ‘doing’. However, in all three programmes, the analysis identified that there were also situations that touched upon critical thinking. Three major themes were identified: critical thinking related to ‘Personal experiences’, ‘The other(s)’ and ‘Wider perspectives’. It appeared that the frequency and nature of such situations varied with the knowledge discourses permeating the programme. Furthermore, we discuss the manifestations of critical thinking in relation to the wider context of what Bernstein refers to as pedagogic rights; individual enhancement, social inclusion and development of the competence and confidence to participate in political processes.     

Just Google it! Digital literacy and the epistemology of ignorance

ABSTRACT

In this paper we examine digital literacy and explicate how it relates to the philosophical study of ignorance. Using data from a study which explores the knowledge producing work of undergraduate students as they wrote course assignments, we argue that a social practice approach to digital literacy can help explain how epistemologies of ignorance may be sustained. If students are restricted in what they can know because they are unaware of exogenous actors (e.g. algorithms), and how they guide choices and shape experiences online, then a key issue with which theorists of digital literacy should contend is how to educate students to be critically aware of how power operates in online spaces. The challenge for Higher Education is twofold: to understand how particular digital literacy practices pave the way for the construction of ignorance, and to develop approaches to counter it.     

Video “Reading” and Multimodality: A Study of ESL/Literacy Pupils’ Interpretation of Cinderella from Their Socio-historical Perspective

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Hispanic ESL/literacy learners used their socio-historical experiences and multimodal resources to mediate interpretation and representation of Cinderella. Eighteen third-grade pupils “read” the video and re-created their understandings in pictures and sentences. The findings suggest that (a) Cinderella should be studied in ESL/literacy curricula as an object of social knowledge and critical analysis, (b) ESL/literacy teachers can use the self-reflective approach to facilitate a critical interpretation of popular cultural texts, and (c) reconceptualizing elementary ESL/literacy classrooms as semiotic spaces allows pupils to interpret videos with a wide range of multimodal resources, and in the process, become consumers and producers of systems of communications.     

Specifying a curriculum for biopolitical critical literacy in science teacher education: exploring roles for science fiction

In this essay I suggest some ways in which science teacher educators in Western neoliberal economies might facilitate learners’ development of a critical literacy concerning the social and cultural changes signified by the concept of biopolitics. I consider how such a biopolitically inflected critical literacy might find expression in a science teacher education curriculum and suggest a number of ways of materializing such a curriculum in specific literatures, media, procedures, and assessment tasks, with particular reference to the contributions of science fiction in popular media.     

How epistemic reflexivity enables teacher educators’ teaching for diversity: Exploring a pedagogical framework for critical thinking

Recent research points to the importance of teacher educators teaching for diversity in initial teacher education programmes. Teaching for diversity is an approach to teacher education in which an understanding of specialist literature and a focus on critical thinking supports a social justice agenda as opposed to merely using different tips and tricks to prepare future teachers for teaching diverse learners in the classroom. In this study, we explored how Australian and New Zealand teacher educators negotiated a social justice agenda in teacher education programmes, using a new transdisciplinary framework of epistemic reflexivity. The Epistemic Reflexivity for Teacher Education (ER-TED) framework draws on epistemic cognition (Clark Chinn’s Aims, Ideals, Reliable epistemic processes – AIR – framework) and Margaret Archer’s reflexivity to explore knowledge claims in teacher educators’ pedagogical decision-making. The findings identified how teacher educators in our study discerned and deliberated with respect to epistemic aims for justification, which involve transformative critical thinking and critical thinking for self. They reported good knowledge (ideals) as being scholarly in nature, and reliable epistemic processes based on higher-order thinking (analysis and evaluating competing ideas) or engaging with multiple perspectives. The teacher educators in our study are clear examples of how strong overall evaluative epistemic stances enable teaching for social justice. We argue that the ER-TED framework can help us as a profession to address teaching for diversity in teacher education programmes based on the belief that the pursuit of social justice requires an evaluativist epistemic stance.     

Fractured academic identities: dyslexia,secondary education,self-esteem and school experiences

ABSTRACT

Identity construction for individuals with dyslexia is significantly moulded by their transition to and experiences within secondary education. This is an interview-based study with 20 participants living in England. Support-related school experiences, relationships with teachers, societal perceptions about the importance of literacy and academic achievement and the reactions of others around them are the core focus. The findings are theorised using symbolic interactionism, and this paper aims to extend Goffman’s notion of ‘spoiled identity’ into a more specialised term for children with Special Educational Needs, resulting in the alternative term ‘fractured academic identity’, the elements of which are developed throughout this paper from the experiences of learners with dyslexia. The findings revolve around identity development as result of academic experiences, and are mainly aimed at teachers, to inform their knowledge around identity issues and to also inform their practice.     

An investigation into the early literacy skills of Grade R Second-language (L2) learners in South Africa

Abstract

Reading proficiency is currently a great concern for South African educators. According to the literature on reading proficiency, reading difficulties stem from early literacy development and any improvement in these early literacy skills may help improve reading proficiency. It has, however also been found that South African learners who participated in this study do not meet the standards for their age group in terms of early literacy development.

Educators need to know what learners should have accomplished in terms of early literacy to support learners before they can commence with instruction in initial reading. Skills crucial for the development of literacy are underlying cognitive skills (i.e., the ability to learn deliberately), the development of symbolic representation, oral language, knowledge of literacy concepts, and behaviours and attitudes. This article looks at the skills required for early literacy development. An empirical investigation was undertaken to determine to what extent these skills were mastered by Grade R second-language (L2) learners. The empirical investigation related these skills to the sub-skills of the School Readiness Evaluation by Trained Testers (SETT) to determine the extent to which a group of Grade R learners have mastered the different skills of early literacy development. The findings paint a bleak picture, since most of the participants lack adequate proficiency regarding the skills of early literacy development.     

Longitudinal perspectives on students’ experiences of feedback: a need for teacher–student partnerships

ABSTRACT

How students react to and use feedback is an important element of their higher education experience. Within the constraints of mass higher education, effective feedback processes are, however, difficult to manage. The aim of this longitudinal qualitative inquiry is to investigate through repeated interviews and related documentary analysis how four case study learners experienced feedback processes over the duration of their undergraduate studies. The analysis is guided by a social constructivist perspective on feedback research. The findings highlight students’ development of more sophisticated orientations to feedback over time; how they experienced and used feedback over the shorter and longer term; their varied affective responses; and how their perspectives evolved. The novel aspects of the findings lie in detailing the individual nature of students’ responses to feedback and documenting the different ways these changed during their undergraduate studies. The role of grades and projected honours classification was a significant element of the performative nature of the students’ experience, and impacted on the extent to which they engaged with feedback. Students often felt that there were dissonances between feedback that teachers were providing and what would be useful or palatable to them. The implications propose that the concept of students as partners can support the reframing of feedback processes as a partnership between students and teachers. Partnership approaches resonate with the need for social constructivist approaches to feedback where knowledge and understanding are co-constructed. Feedback partnerships also carry potential to enable the mutual development of staff and student feedback literacy.     

Teacher Agency in South African Education Policy Related to School Safety

Abstract

Safety in and around schools is an on-going concern in South Africa. Current education policy related to school safety institutes mechanisms to reduce violence as a measure of promoting safety. The highest rate of violence reported by learners occurs in the classroom. By implication, how teachers are either enabled or constrained to respond to violent incidents in classrooms is critical. With the aim to determine how education policy related to school safety either enables or constrains teacher agency in South African education policy related to school safety, the article reports on a study that examined the mechanisms of the National School Safety Framework (NSSF) together with the context at schools. The study found that the NSSF mechanisms and school context find little enabling teacher agentic action, where learning is concerned. Although the NSSF mechanisms require teachers to perform many roles as measures of reducing violence to promote school safety, none involve pedagogic strategies or techniques. Given that teachers’ greatest challenge in the context of violence is the disruption of teaching and learning, the NSSF mechanisms are inadequate as an education policy related to school safety within the current context of insecurity in South African schools.     

Consulting the UK ESD community on an ESD indicator to recommend to Government: an insight into the micro‐politics of ESD

In 2006 the author was contracted to research possible approaches to a UK indicator of education for sustainable development (ESD). This article describes and seeks to explain the response of government advisers and influential members of the UK ESD community to the approaches he proposed. While the UK strategy for sustainable development called for a result indicator to show the impact of ESD on learners’ knowledge and awareness of sustainable development, the indicator that was recommended to government by its advisers, after consulting the ESD community, was essentially a facilitative indicator showing the percentage of schools that rated themselves good or outstanding using a self‐evaluation instrument linked to the emerging sustainable schools framework. An opportunity to monitor the impact of ESD on learners’ sustainability literacy and encourage more socially critical approaches was lost as the micro‐politics of ESD (the preferences of advisers and those consulted) failed to challenge the macro‐politics examined in the author’s earlier article.     

Divergent paths,same destiny: A Bourdieusian perspective on refugee families' negotiation of urban school transition in the US

This article documents five refugee families and their children's efforts to reestablish themselves in an urban school context in the US. A thematic analysis of the families’ negotiation with the urban school system, the language programmes and their home engagement practices suggests that they were subjected to symbolic violence brought upon by the precarious context of reception, the monolingual ideologies and the hegemonic practices of the urban schools and resettlement policies and agencies. Such symbolic violence systematically fractured their language learning, educational success, and upward social mobility. Therefore, despite their divergent paths of immigration and resettlement, the children shared similar stories of system blockage, inertia, and fragmentation. These shared trajectories suggest the need for multi-layered changes to remove blockages in the education and immigration system, transform the dispositions and practices of the key players, including policy makers, school administrators and teachers, and raise critical consciousness among the refugees.