Reading for academic purposes: the literacy practices of British,French and Spanish Law and Economics students as background for study abroad

Study‐abroad students, products of their own particular academic literacy culture, face the challenge of rapidly integrating into a foreign academic literacy community. This study identifies possible culturally dependent sources of literacy problems in Law and Economics students in Great Britain, France and Spain. Nearly 600 potential European study‐abroad candidates (ERASMUS programme) and 169 of their university teachers from 17 universities in the three countries completed a questionnaire on first language (L1) reading practices. Results revealed distinct academic literacy profiles within disciplines across national cultures. Academic reading practices are seen to be more important overall in Britain, significantly less so in Spain, while France shows some characteristics of both British and Spanish approaches. Summarised results of a concurrent investigation into ERASMUS students' foreign language reading skills suggest the influence of L1 literacy traditions on foreign language reading, which points to pedagogical implications and directions for further study.     

Not just ‘sunny days’: Aboriginal students connect out‐of‐school literacy resources with school literacy practices

In this paper, I report on a school‐university collaborative research project that investigated which practices and knowledges of Canadian Aboriginal students not acknowledged in school may provide these students with access to school literacy practices. The study, which took place in a small city in Western Canada, examined ways to merge the out‐of‐school literacy resources with school literacy practices for minority language learners who struggle with academic literacies. Drawing on the third space theory, in conjunction with the concept of “funds of knowledge,” I explain how students' linguistic and cultural resources from home and community networks were utilised to reshape school literacy practices through their involvement in the Heritage Fair programme. I analyse a representative case study of Darius, a 10‐year‐old boy who explored his familial hunting practices for his Heritage Fair project. This illustrative exemplar, “Not just sunny days,” highlights the ways in which children's out‐of‐school lives can be used as a scaffold for literacy learning. In conclusion, I discuss implications for educators and researchers working to improve literacy learning for minority students by connecting school learning to children's out‐of‐school learning.     

Preschool Teachers' Sense of Community,Instructional Quality,and Children's Language and Literacy Gains

Research Findings: This study investigated relations among preschool teachers' (n = 75) sense of community, classroom language and literacy instructional quality, and children's (n = 398) gains in vocabulary and print concept knowledge during an academic year. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results indicated that teachers' language and literacy instructional quality significantly predicted children's gains in print concept knowledge. Also, HLM results revealed significant interactions among teachers' sense of community, language and literacy instructional quality, and vocabulary and print concept knowledge gains. Higher levels of teachers' sense of community were associated with greater gains in children's vocabulary and print concept knowledge when children were in classrooms with higher quality language and literacy instruction. Practice or Policy: Findings underscore the importance of evaluating both language and literacy instructional quality and teachers' sense of community when considering high-quality preschool education.     

Dynamic,Playful and Productive Literacies

This paper reflects on recent projects in a variety of media forms, in both formal and informal educational settings, discussing ways of expanding our notions of literacy practices which reflect their place in the wider lived experience of digital culture. We have collected these reflections under three headings. The first of these, Dynamic Literacies, presents an overarching view of literacy as both ideological, following the ‘new literacy studies’, and dynamic, incorporating both semiotic and sociocultural versions of literacy in ways which reflect the changing nature of lived experience in the digital age. The second strand, Productive Literacies, constructs an argument around digital making practices with younger learners which views these as media crafting, critique and artistry. The third strand, Playful Literacies, explores recent projects which are located in games and game-authoring practices as a specific example of connecting pedagogy to contemporary media forms and learner agency in formal and informal settings. Taken together, the three perspectives allow for common ground to be established between multimodal production practices, whilst providing suggestions for framing literacy pedagogy in response to the pervasive use of media and technology in contemporary digital culture.     

Women and literacy: a Nepal perspective

This article looks at adult women's experiences of literacy and literacy learning in a remote area of Western Nepal. As part of a research degree at Sussex University, I spent eight months living in a small village community where an American aid agency was implementing a development programme, comprising of a literacy class with follow-up income-generating activities for women. Drawing on an “ideological” approach to literacy research, I investigated how women and men of differing ages and economic backgrounds used literacy in their everyday lives. My research aimed to move away from the simple polarisation of women and men, traditional and developed, to analyse what meanings of literacy and gender were shared or disputed between different groups of people and how they reacted to literacy interventions by a foreign aid agency.By looking at three main kinds of literacy practices which so-called “illiterate” women participated in—existing everyday practices such as religious reading; new everyday practices such as account keeping introduced by the aid agency; and the literacy class which ran every evening in the village—this article analyses how women reacted to different kinds of literacies and what they gained from attending a literacy class. Everyday literacies tended to be seen as separate or even in opposition to the literacy class or new practices since they were learnt informally in the home. Many new literacy practices, such as form filling or keeping minutes, were viewed by both men and women as symbolic of the agency's authority but not necessarily useful. The literacy class introduced women to new roles as “class participants” and more participatory methods of teaching, but they preferred the kind of education seen in local schools so encouraged the teacher to adopt chanting methods and mirror the hierarchical teacher–pupil relationship.Though the women contested the dominant model of literacy and gender presented to them by the aid agency—that reading and writing would help in their existing role as mothers or wives or were useful for income generating—they wanted to become “educated” by attending the literacy class. They felt they gained a new identity through becoming literate and valued the additional social space that the class gave them as a group of women from differing backgrounds. Certain new practices like creative writing, though imposed by the aid agency, were welcomed by women at the class as enabling them to have a new voice.     

Theories of Bernstein and Shulman: their relevance to teacher training courses in England using adult numeracy courses as an example

Since 2002, adult numeracy specifications have been introduced for the first time in England. This article investigates the relevance of Bernstein and Shulman's theoretical frameworks to teacher training using the new Level 4 adult numeracy teacher training programmes as an example. The article discusses Bernstein's theories relating to pedagogic methods of acquisition and transmission. It investigates the recontextualization process in which subject content and teaching standards may be translated into teaching approaches, which can be used by trainee teachers. It also investigates Shulman's model of pedagogical reasoning and action in relation to teacher training. The article bases its evidence on a research project, which evaluates teacher training courses in adult numeracy and literacy, and English for speakers of other languages in England. The article suggests that the two educationists' theories have significant relevance to the design and implementation of teacher training courses. It also suggests that they can be used alongside each other with each educationist's theories having their particular strengths. Bernstein's theories emphasize a rigorous approach to course structuring; Shulman's theories offer an insightful approach to how a trainee transforms subject and teaching standards knowledge and skills into possible teaching methods to help her learners understand the subject.     

Possibilities for pedagogy in further education: harnessing the abundance of literacy

In this report, it is argued that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, and that the extent and nature of students' communicative resources is a central issue in education. The text outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project in a social view of literacy, and the associated research design, methodology and analytical framework. It elaborates on the notion of the abundance of literacies in students' everyday lives, and on the potential for harnessing these as resources for the enhancement of learning. It provides case studies of changes in practice that have been undertaken by further education staff in order to draw upon students' everyday literacy practices on Travel and Tourism and Multimedia courses. It ends with some of the broad implications for conceptualising learning that arise from researching through the lens of literacy practices.     

Gendered pedagogic identities and academic professionalism in Greek medical schools

Feminist scholarship has considered how pedagogical identities and emotions are implicated in the gender politics of belonging and othering in higher education. This paper examines how gendered and embodied pedagogy is mobilised in Greek medical schools to construct notions of the ideal academic and assert women’s position women in Academic Medicine. I employ thematic analysis to illustrate that formations of pedagogy and academic professionalism are bound up with emotions and embodied practices of relating, connecting, creating learning communities and promoting virtuous academic citizenship. Women’s gendered accounts of pedagogy and their boundary practices of identification demonstrate agency, intentionality and operate as highly political actions of legitimacy and resistance within the patriarchal realm of Greek higher education. I argue that gendered discourses of pedagogy in Greek medical schools become resources for resisting neo-liberal notions of academic work, individualism and women’s exclusion in the highly prestigious discipline of academic medicine in Greece.     

Children's literacy interest and its relation to parents’ literacy‐promoting practices

This study examined how children's literacy interests related to parent literacy‐promoting practices across time. Using a sample of 909 preschool‐age children and the newly developed Child Activities Preference Checklist, literacy interest appeared to be a complex construct, not easily captured by a single measure. In a subsample of 230 children with longitudinal data, parent literacy practices and child literacy interests related concurrently and across time. Parent literacy practices were more stable than child literacy interests, with children's literacy interest continuing to develop over the preschool year. Parent practices of exposing children to literacy and teaching them literacy concepts appeared to be distinct constructs. Exposure to literacy was especially important in the growth of literacy interests and the hypothesis that exposure has a negative effect on children with little initial interest was not fully supported.     

Academic literacies: the word is not enough

For Academic Literacies, the world is textually mediated; written texts and what informs them reveal elements such as subject-discipline practices. Furthermore, multi-modalities, for example, visual representation, inform written text, and multiple methods of inquiry, including interviews, shed light on written text production. In this article we argue that the word is not enough, and non-textual elements must also be considered. From multiple-discipline focused research, we present data from interviews and focus groups with Design and Nursing lecturers that explored student success holistically, not solely through, or for, written text production. We highlight non-textual elements key to both student success, and written text production, such as ‘empathy’, the ‘visual’, the ‘non-verbal’, and also the inability of text to reveal certain key features. We argue that rather than solely prioritise text, Academic Literacies approaches can more effectively help students succeed by holistically considering non-textual elements.     

The scrumpled geography of literacies for learning

This paper draws upon the experience of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project in the UK. The project explored the literacy demands of a number of curriculum areas and the literacy practices of students in their everyday lives, in order to identify those ‘border literacies’ which may act as resources for learning and attainment within their college courses. Drawing on Literacy Studies and aspects of actor-network theory, this article outlines the conceptual innovations that we found necessary arising from our data analysis, extending existing work on situating practice and boundary crossing to posit a conceptual landscape that we term the scrumpled geography of literacies for learning. This landscape is one in which purification, naturalization and translation are key concepts, where literacy practices are enacted as network effects of a folding of a range of micro-practices into conglomerations.     

The Growth of Knowledge and the Discursive Gap

This article raises the question of the character of Bernstein's theory. It draws upon a set of key concepts elaborated in some of his later papers, although we suggest that it is possible to discern the origins of these ideas in much earlier work. In the first section, Bernstein's diagnosis of the sociology of education as a horizontal knowledge structure with a weak grammar is discussed and an apparent paradox identified: if the sociology of education has this form, how can we account for Bernstein's own theory? The remainder of the paper uses the case of Bernstein's own work as a way of exploring the conditions for knowledge growth in sociology as a vertical knowledge structure with a strong grammar.     

Basil Bernstein at the Micro Level of the Classroom

This paper focuses on questions related to pedagogic practices in the classroom and is fundamentally based on Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse. It discusses the interplay of the characteristics of pedagogic practice which former studies have indicated contain the potential for a better scientific understanding. It also discusses the importance of a mixed pedagogic practice with strong or weak values of classification and framings, depending on given aspects of that practice. The paper continues with a discussion of some aspects of the methodologies used, and a discussion of education as a horizontal structure of knowledge with science educators' common reluctance to accept ways of teaching based on horizontal structures of knowledge with weak grammars (e.g. sociology). The paper suggests how this can be reversed if Bernstein's theory, with its high conceptual structure, is considered.     

One‐way Traffic? Connections between Literacy Practices at Home and in the Nursery

This article reports on a small‐scale study which examined the home literacy practices of a group of 3 and 4 year‐old children in a working‐class community in the north of England and explored how far these practices were reflected in the curriculum of the nursery the children attended. The data illustrate that there was a dissonance between out‐of‐school and schooled literacy practices and that there was more evidence of nursery literacy practices infiltrating the home than vice versa. Children's literacy practices in the home were focused on media and popular cultural texts and the article argues for greater recognition of these contemporary cultural practices in early years policy documentation and curriculum guidance.     

A holistic approach to international students, institutional habitus and academic literacies in an Irish third level institution

This qualitative study examines the interplay between academic staff and international students with regard to developing academic literacies at university. Higher education has traditionally responded to increasing student diversity with the expectation that students will conform to institutional norms or habitus. In this context international students arrive with cultural capital which may not fit such norms, and would benefit from developing their academic literacy, as indeed would home students given an increasingly diverse student body in Irish higher education. Findings reveal a gap between academics expectations and international students’ capabilities. Academic staff remained within the remit of the research in contrast to the 22 international students who were interviewed. They did not separate the totality of their campus experience from academic literacy practices. These ranged from uncertainty around writing in another language to a mismatch between diversity management in class and students’ own expectations. International students found difficulty to making friends on campus which could benefit their integration into the academic literacy practices of their respective disciplines. Findings point towards a whole institution response to student diversity which transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.     

Competent performances of situated identities: Adult learners of English accessing engaged participation

The Communities of Practice (CofP) framework and theories of engaged participation have profoundly shaped how we theorize, investigate, and represent a variety of learning and teaching processes, both in and out of classroom contexts. Within this framework, useful distinctions have been made between a teaching curriculum and a learning curriculum, with the former being interrogated for ascribing limited identities to its learners and the latter valued for the ways it prioritizes learning (and its resources) from a learner's perspective. Analysis of data collected utilizing ethnographic methods (e.g. document collection, participant observation, interviews) demonstrates that, even though the teaching curriculum of one adult ESL program itself provided limited “structuring resources” (and learning opportunities) to its learners, the learners' participation in the program helped them to recognize and value the kinds of engaged participation necessary to access membership in local workplace communities of practice. However, findings also show that while these adult learners of English managed to learn and adopt the practices of one community of practice, they remained excluded from legitimate membership in other communities of practice. The analysis raises questions about the limits and possibilities of a teaching curriculum that values “real world” experiences (and situated learning) in theory but does not prioritize them in practice.     

The Sacred and the Profane in Recent Struggles to Promote Official Pedagogic Identities

This paper begins by highlighting the concerns of a number of commentators about what they perceived as an unprecedented incursion of market-oriented instrumental values in higher education in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Bernstein's analysis of these issues is shown to draw upon Durkheimian concepts of the sacred and the profane. Similarities and differences between Durkheim's and Bernstein's definitions of these concepts are examined, and Bernstein's use of them in relation to the formation of pedagogic identities is a major focus of the paper. The second part of the paper examines two particular aspects of Bernstein's exploration of the consequences of growing marketization and managerialization for identity change in education: the displacement of 'singulars' by 'regions', and the introduction of 'generic' pedagogic modes. In both cases, although perhaps to differing degrees, the sacred is displaced and, under certain conditions, the profane 'outer' is in danger of becoming the subjective 'inner'. Bernstein's discussion of generic modes is illustrated by reference to recent changes in teacher training in England and Wales.     

Patterns of students' and teachers' interactions in learning centres: a case study of three teacher leaders in an elementary school

This study investigated the instructional practices of three teacher leaders employed in a diverse, elementary school in the USA. Through extended observations, it was found that learning centres occupied a central role in the organisation and learning in each of the classrooms. Bernstein's theory of classification and framing was used to analyse the patterns of classroom interactions and identify the skills and values from learning centres. This research critically examined the role centres play in developing academic and social skills in learners, including those learners from lower socio-economic backgrounds and English language learners (ELL). Learning centres were constructed on an expectation that learners made self-initiated decisions, collaborated with peers, and contributed to the development of students' academic, linguistic, and social skills in students of colour, students from lower socio-economic class backgrounds, and ELL.