Blue listerine, parochialism, and ASL literacy

There are not many elements of human life that have had as significant an impact on our development as literacy. Literacy has certainly been, and remains, a crucial issue especially in Deaf Education and in the Deaf World. The traditional definition of literacy has been exclusively understood as reading and writing. However, this article is intended to provide a thoughtful and provocative commentary that supports adopting new directions and comprehensive definitions for understanding literacy, which includes both written and signed languages. By applying ideas from Deaf Studies and New Literacy Studies we will conduct a thorough exploration of the fundamental components of literacy and illuminate important political and practical applications related to Deaf Education.     

主体·参与·创新

探讨了在中职数学教学中,应以学生为主体,加强学生的参与意识,创建教学互动时空,让学生轻松地学习,获得快乐、成功体验,培养学生继续学习的能力与创新精神,从而实现为学习专业知识的学习和职业技能的培养奠定基础.     

Freire,literacy and emancipatory gender learning

The contributions to education of one of the great Latin American thinkers, Paulo Freire, have been enormous. His voice and wisdom have inspired educators globally. Three particular contributions – to emancipation, to literacy, and to dialogue – are explored in this article through a critical lens. From a gender perspective, Freire’s path to consciousness-raising is crucial for emancipation but so also is empowerment, a notion contributed by the women’s movement. Adult literacy, Freire’s vehicle to raise consciousness, has been challenged by a recognition of the complexity underlying its acquisition, a factor we still have to incorporate in training and teaching programmes. Dialogical approaches in adult education, essential as they are to the attainment of deeper understanding of social phenomena and the possibility of consensual social action, build on a long trajectory of efforts to use public space for collective advancement. Situating Freire against a denser historical background enables the recognition of his merits and at the same time rescues the confluence of similar perceptions as well as different ideas in the construction of our contemporary world.     

An examination of the construct of legitimate peripheral participation as a theoretical framework in literacy research

This review critically examines the use in literacy research of Lave and Wenger's (1991) construct of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), a view of learning as participation by which newcomers adopt a group's ways, moving from periphery to the center of a practice. From a search through 10 literacy-relevant journals from 1991 to the present, we purposively selected 20 pieces that relied centrally on LPP and analyzed these for ways in which practice and apprenticeship were instantiated. Regarding practice, we inquired about legitimacy and engagement; regarding apprenticeship, we asked about the deployment of experts' attention and the cost of newcomers' mistakes. Using the benefit of the 20+ years since the original publication, our critique offers six principles to evaluate researchers' use of LPP and community of practice as constructs to describe learners' experience, and summarizes how some of our 20 studies made felicitous use of the constructs and others less so.     

Rethinking literacy: communication,representation and text

In this article I want to consider shifts in the use of the word ‘literacy’ and the implications for classroom work with texts, particularly the implications of the rapid and radical emergence of new relationships between different modes of representation and communication ( Kress, 2003; Raney, 1996; Unsworth, 2001 ). My concern is to argue that any approach to classroom literacy needs not only to recognise the new forms of text which children meet every day but to give multimodal texts a firm place in the curriculum. Further, if the text experience of young learners about these new combinations of modes of representation are to be realised in the classroom, then we need a framework for describing those texts. An approach which takes account of the rhetoric of design may be a way forward.     

Public libraries,digital literacy and participatory culture

In recent years public libraries have experimented with user-generated or community-contributed content through the interactive tools of Web 2.0. For some commentators this not just establishes a new relationship between libraries and their publics, but signals the end of information hegemony and an ‘expert paradigm’. Such claims need to be treated with caution. This article argues that public library experiments with user-generated content can be more usefully analysed in the context of wider institutional mandates around literacy, civic engagement and access. This article critically examines some recent library developments in this field, with a particular focus on Australian libraries.     

科学素养与人文素养的比较研究

科学素养与人文素养,是当前教育界比较热门的两个词汇.二者在内容与培养方式上,既有相似和联系,也有天然存在的区别.本文就此做一比较,以抛砖引玉.     

Mind the gap: Investigating test literacy and classroom literacy

Focusing on the 2006 examination paper on Richard III , this article starts by examining the assumptions about reading Shakespeare that inform the Key Stage 3 national tests for 14-year-olds in England. It then analyses one student's response to the test, contrasting this performance with evidence drawn from classroom observation and digital video data.     

Re-thinking Assessment: Multimodality,literacy and computer-mediated learning

All teaching and learning in the school classroom involves a range of modes including speech, writing, gesture, gaze, body-posture, movement, and so on--in other words teaching and learning are multimodal. This is as true of school English, where common-sense would have it that teaching and learning are fully realised in language, as it is of school Science where the role of action is firmly established in the curriculum. While all teaching and learning is multimodal, the use of computers in the classroom serves to emphasise the multimodal character of pedagogy. Computer applications introduce new kinds of texts into the classroom and these demand different practices of students. In turn this suggests the need to re-think conceptions of literacy, learning and assessment--to move beyond the narrow definition of literacy apparent in recent government policy to a broader definition that realises the connections between literacy and social practices in a multimodal digital era. The questions raised by the move from a language-based curriculum to a multimodal curriculum are explored in this paper through an illustrative example of computer mediated learning in the school English classroom.     

Building literacy in alphabetic, abjad and morphosyllabic systems

Preschoolers?? metalinguistic and visual capabilities may be associated with the writing system of their culture. We examined patterns of performance in phonological awareness, naming of letters, morphological awareness, and visual-spatial relations, in 5-year-old native speakers of Spanish (n?=?43), Hebrew (n?=?40), and Cantonese (n?=?63) and the relations of these literacy related skills to concurrent word writing and word reading. The writing systems in these languages represent three major categories, i.e., alphabetic (Spanish), abjad (Hebrew), and morphosyllabic (Chinese). Phonological awareness, letter naming, and perception of visual-spatial relations differed across groups, whereas morphological awareness showed a similar level of attainment in all three languages. Stepwise regression analyses explaining writing and reading for each language separately revealed both commonalities and differences between languages. Phonological awareness assessed by initial syllable deletion contributed to writing and to reading in Cantonese and in Spanish. Phonological awareness assessed by final phoneme isolation explained reading in Hebrew, whereas final and initial phoneme isolation explained writing in Hebrew. Letter naming predicted both writing and reading in Spanish and in Hebrew, while perception of visual-spatial relations did so in Cantonese. At age 5, children??s metalinguistic knowledge and visual discrimination abilities are already attuned to the particular features of the writing system to which they are exposed.     

Politics of knowledge,models of development and literacy

is an analyst of grassroots movements and popular knowledge. He has started and provided consultancy to various grassroots groups. He is currently involved in research on the topics of social movements, discourse of development, ecology and the politics of knowledge within new social movements.