Standards-based reform to senior-secondary curriculum and metacognition in the literacy domain

This study analyses the intended and enacted curricula that are produced when metacognition is included as an element within standards-based reforms for schooling. Reformers of the senior-secondary curriculum for South Australia (SA) and the Northern Territory (NT) hoped to improve the academic outcomes of all students, and especially those from low-SES and Indigenous backgrounds, by creating a curriculum that required year-10 students to reflect on their capacities. Reflection on learning in the literacy domain was a particular emphasis during the reforms. A constructionist epistemology and case-study methodology informed the approach taken in the study. Data collection and analysis involved accessing and analysing the intended curriculum, as well as the curriculum planning documentation designed by four teachers in one NT high school. The results indicate that learning opportunities to reflect on literacy capacities will not be created when the intended curriculum provides teachers, who are not literacy specialists, with little guidance about practices associated with metacognition and literacy.     

Telling Tales Out of School: The construction of parental literacy in school culture

ABSTRACT

This article examines practices and products of school culture: jokes, hallway conversations, home-school correspondence and interpersonal interactions between parents and teachers. These practices construct parents as functionally, but not critically, literate and serve to reproduce a dominant ideology which presumes a hierarchical relationship between teachers and parents with professional thought and practice superior to parents' in educational matters. Examples of parental and professional resistance to such disempowering constructions of parental literacies are offered to demonstrate possibilities for the development of a more just and literate community.     

Social literacy and citizenship education in the school curriculum

This article explores citizenship education's need to focus on both ‘political’ and ‘social’ literacy within a communitarian framework. The Crick Report (1998; see also Lahey, Crick and Porter, 1974), while recognizing that the social dimension of citizenship education was a precondition for both the civic and political dimensions, concentrated largely on ‘political’ literacy. This article examines the social dimension of citizenship education. Concern with the social dimension of the curriculum in schools is not a recent interest, but changes within society have accelerated the social demands made upon schools. At the very least, society expects schools to correct the behaviour of children and to teach them values which usually means insisting on ‘good’ behaviour. The social development of pupils has thus assumed a much greater place in the aspirations of schools. Programmes of personal and social education, together with citizenship education, invariably emphasize a range of social skills and these skills are introduced early and built upon throughout the years of schooling. An individual's sense and ability to make socially productive decisions do not develop by themselves; rather, they require knowledge, values and skills. Above all opportunities are required for children to experience social relations in such a way that they are able to operate critically within value-laden discourses and thereby to become informed and ethically empowered, active citizens.     

Making the hidden curriculum visible: sustainability literacy in higher education

Despite strong political support for the development of sustainability literacy amongst the UK graduates, embedding sustainability in the higher education curriculum has met with widespread indifference, and in some cases, active resistance. However, opportunities exist beyond the formal curriculum for engaging students in learning about sustainability. Previous research has highlighted the potential of the university campus for experiential, place-based learning about and for sustainability. This has been conceptualised as the ‘informal’ curriculum, consisting of extra-curricular activities and student projects linking estates and operations to formal study. However, the impact of the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ (the implicit messages a university sends about sustainability through the institutional environment and values) has been overlooked as a potential influence on student learning and behaviour. This article reports on a small-scale research project which utilised a phenomenographic approach to explore students’ perceptions of the ‘hidden sustainability curriculum’ at a leading sustainability university. The findings suggest that helping students deconstruct the hidden campus curriculum may enhance aspects of sustainability literacy; developing students’ understanding about sustainability and creating solutions to sustainability issues, enabling evaluative dialogue around campus sustainability and also self-reflection, which could be transformative and translate into pro-environmental behaviour change. This research is transferable to other contexts.     

Official and popular culture in the schooling process

This article analyses the schooling process in rural areas of Galicia (Spain) from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, considering educational initiatives promoted by both the state and the rural population. The former, which were governed by the official school culture, were driven by a moralistic approach; the latter, within the framework of popular school culture, were essentially aimed at literacy. The confrontation that arose between the two initiatives was finally resolved in favour of the official school. Our main goal here is to analyse how popular schools (ferrado schools) were perceived by official culture (school administrators and education experts) as well as by those who were directly involved as protagonists, i.e. the schoolteachers who ran these schools (escolantes) and their pupils.     

Kindergarten teachers' literacy beliefs and self-reported practices: On the heels of a new national literacy curriculum

This study took place six years after the introduction of a national early literacy curriculum in Israel. We compared the beliefs of kindergarten teachers on the importance of literacy goals with their perception of parents' and the educational system's beliefs. We examined teachers' self-reported practices and how these practices changed with the curriculum adoption. Teachers (N = 120) responded to a closed questionnaire, and 12 of them were interviewed. Incongruence emerged between teachers' own beliefs and the beliefs they attributed to others. This incongruence facilitates understanding of the rationales for their practices and their relationships with parents and professional partners.     

Multimodal literacy learning opportunities within a grade six classroom literacy curriculum: constraints and enablers

This case study of a grade six classroom literacy curriculum in Ontario, Canada was designed to produce new knowledge of how curricula can promote multimodal literacy learning opportunities for students. With a focus on constraints and enablers, the study found few opportunities for multimodal literacy learning due to standardised assessments, an outcomes-based programmatic curriculum with related standardised report card, and assessment-focused professional learning opportunities. Despite the print-centric nature of the curriculum, however, the study found that students did initiate their own multimodal opportunities. The study has implications for educators across the globe who are interested in expanding students’ literacies.     

Early literacy practices and the Finnish national core curriculum

In 2004 the Finnish National Board of Education launched a new curriculum framework that includes principles, instructional aims, and a brief list of content by subject areas. The intent of this framework is that teachers should interpret the core curriculum at the local level and apply it in their own schools and classrooms. This approach encourages teachers to use their professional knowledge and take into account their students and the learning environment in applying and implementing the curriculum. This case study sought to understand how this core curriculum has been implemented by way of observations of language and literacy lessons in 8 grade 1 and grade 2 classrooms during a 2‐month period. The observations and the analysis were guided by earlier research conducted in classroom identified as ‘excellent’ in the US. The resulting data, in turn, were compared with the core curriculum. The findings show that, although some of the principles and the content of the core curriculum were reflected in practice, there were inconsistencies between the instructional methods used in the classrooms and the principles set in the core curriculum. Although some areas of the core curriculum were well represented in classroom language and literacy practices, others were covered only in part or not at all during the observation period.     

多维视阈下大众文化分众化成因及趋势分析

经济的发展改变了人们传统的生产方式,不同的消费群体具有不同的大众文化需求,大众文化分众化的产生和趋势发展也与公众接受信息量的速度加快有关,当前"数字鸿沟"的客观存在和社会文化分层等因素对大众文化的分众化有重大影响,从而导致了接受大众文化行为的分众化趋势.     

苏青与四十年代市民文化

苏青能够在 40年代上海滩上脱颖而出 ,一方面是因为战争危机唤起了人们对日常生活的重新发现 ;另一方面 ,其作品独具特色的海派风情和界于雅俗之间的审美风格 ,满足了多数读者的阅读期待     

Evaluation of a curriculum to support literacy growth in young children

This study of growth in literacy was conducted over a 5-month period in a preschool classroom in which half of the enrollees were Head Start children and the other half were tuition students. The literacy events of six children from this classroom were videotaped daily. Videotape data were supplemented by other data sources, including weekly collaborative meetings between the teacher and the researcher. Children were administered three literacy tasks at the beginning and end of the study to supplement observational data. Analysis of the data indicated that all six grew in their interest in and knowledge of written language. Implications for curriculum materials and experiences to support literacy growth were generated.     

Teachers and science curriculum materials: where we are and where we need to go

Curriculum materials serve as a key conceptual tool for science teachers, and better understanding how science teachers use these tools could help to improve both curriculum design and theory related to teacher learning and decision-making. The authors review the literature on teachers and science curriculum materials. The review is organised around three main questions: What do teachers do when using science curriculum materials?, What happens when teachers use science curriculum materials? and Why do teachers make the decisions they do? For each question, the authors first summarise the findings of two key reviews from the mathematics education literature, then situate the findings from science education in juxtaposition with those findings. The review uncovers that relatively little is understood about the mechanism underlying how teachers interact with curriculum materials. To try to address this gap, complementing and extending the field’s existing understandings of the teacher–curriculum relationship, the authors make four propositions, grounded in the literature on self-regulation. The propositions reflect a mechanism for teacher curricular decision-making. The self-regulation perspective also helps to develop more targeted support for science teachers aimed at the uptake, adaptation and enactment of curriculum materials in ways that are intended, and that teachers themselves experience as an improvement in their teaching. The authors conclude with a call for research that further explores the ways in which individual science teachers’ decision-making is situated within the wider sociocultural context.     

流行文化对流行语的影响和渗透

时下的许多社会流行语均源自大众流行文化,而媒体对这些流行语的使用及迎合确立了其在书面语系统中的地位。我们应加强对流行文化的引导;注意媒体语言对社会流行语的正确引导作用,使之更加准确、生动地满足社会交际需要。     

Potential for play in a primary literacy curriculum

Abstract

The benefits of play in the learning and development of young children has long been recognized by researchers and early childhood educators. As new teachers face the challenges of increasingly diverse classrooms, in an increasingly demanding political climate, the potential of play has implications for teacher educators who prepare those new teachers. This study investigated literacy use during play in the researcher's culturally diverse first grade classroom, finding that children applied various functions of print, practiced skills, and explored concepts that had been introduced in the formal curriculum. These observations reinforce the notion that play encompasses many of the conditions necessary for literacy development and is a useful means of extending and supporting the formal literacy curriculum. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.     

Putting literature at the heart of the literacy curriculum

This paper documents an initiative in Continuing Professional Development, conceived and carried out by London's Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). The intention was to improve the teaching and learning of writing in Years 5 and 6 of the primary school (9–11‐year‐olds), through working with challenging literature. This teacher education project drew on CLPE's earlier research project, published as The Reader in the Writer ( Barrs and Cork, 2001 ). Classroom approaches developed through the initiative are described, and qualitative and quantitative changes in children's writing are discussed. Patterns of teaching in the classrooms that appear to have made a particular difference to the children's achievement are explored.