Developing ecological literacy in a forest garden: children’s perspectives

Today, cities become more dense, green spaces disappear and children spend less time outdoors. Research suggests that these conditions create health problems and lack of ecological literacy. To reverse such trends, localities are creating urban green spaces for children to visit during school time. Drawing on ideas in ecological literacy, this study investigates school children’s perspectives on a forest garden, a type of outdoor educational setting previously only scarcely researched. Data were collected through walk-and-talk conversations and informal interviews with 28 children aged 7 to 9. Many children in the study expressed strong positive feelings about the forest garden, the organized and spontaneous activities there, and caring for the organisms living there. We observed three aspects of learning in the data, potentially beneficial for the development of children’s ecological literacy: practical competence, learning how to co-exist and care, and biological knowledge and ecological understanding.     

A taxonomy and research framework for personalization in children’s literacy apps

This paper reviews the key types of personalization in children’s literacy apps to propose a taxonomy and research framework for future empirical studies Systematic content analysis was used to identify the amount and type of personalization in a hundred most popular children’s literacy apps/digital books. Titles with three and more personalization features were screened qualitatively to identify what can be personalized, how personalization occurs and who personalizes the experience. Similar themes were synthesized into a research framework that outlines how identity, self-evaluation and agency relate to personalization. The discussion sets the agenda for future research, design and evaluation of children’s digital books.     

Minecraft and children’s digital making: implications for media literacy education

This article aims to contribute new knowledge about the media literacies children assemble as they play the digital game Minecraft which it describes as a children's digital making platform. The article argues media literacy's tendency to use socio-cultural and humanist accounts of media participation limit its ability to fully explain digital making practices. Socio-material and performative literacy theories are used to introduce a framework for exploring digital media literacies across four nodes: digital materials, media production, conceptual understanding and media analysis [Dezuanni, M. 2015.“The Building Blocks of Digital Media Literacy: Socio-material Participation and the Production of Media Knowledge.”Journal of Curriculum Studies 47 (3): 416–419]. The article's second half outlines how the author uses digital ethnography in his home to understand children's Minecraft digital making and the article's theoretical claims are explored using empirical data. The conclusion considers the ramifications of digital making for media literacy research and practice.     

Hymns,prayers and Bible stories: the role of religious literacy practices in children’s literacy learning

This paper examines the role of religious literacy practices such as hymns, prayers and Bible stories in the context of literacy teaching in primary schools in England. Drawing on data collected through a classroom ethnography of a year 1 class (five and six-year-olds) conducted in a Catholic primary school in 2013 and 2014, I suggest that religious literacy practices contribute to children’s literacy learning in various ways. They focus children’s attention on a text’s meaning, not on decoding, as other literacy lessons do. They do not privilege rational thinking but afford more emotional and bodily experiences of meaning-making. These practices also offer opportunities for collaborative engagements with literacy, supporting learning through participation. My findings suggest that educators, researchers and policy-makers should pay greater attention to the range of literacy practices children engage with and how they contribute to their literacy learning.     

‘Chuck out the teacher’: radical pedagogy in the community

Theories of radical or critical pedagogy have emphasized the importance of relating educational work to broader social movements although this has not been developed in detail. The recent history of community publishing and worker writing workshops in Britain helps to illuminate how these ideas have been adapted in a number of informal settings. Using archive materials, interviews with activists and my personal experience I explore some dilemmas and tensions within the idea of radical pedagogy. In particular, attempts to reconfigure relations between writers/students and organizers/tutors, as well as the role of personal experience, are examined in relation to both organizational and wider societal relations. These interventions faced many challenges but were not completely undermined.     

Digital play as a means to develop children’s literacy and power in the Swedish preschool

Abstract

This paper presents different angles on the subject of digital play as a means to develop children’s literacy and power, using an online ethnographical study of Swedish preschool teachers’ discussions in informal online forums. Question posts (n = 239) were analysed using the Technological Pedagogical Knowledge framework and the Caring, Nurturing and Teaching framework, with the aim of understanding how teachers intended to support children’s literacy development with tablets. Literacy development can be understood as a social practice that needs to develop along with changes in society’s demands on citizens. The results presented indicate that school subject oriented skills are predominantly present in the mind-set of these preschool teachers. When digital play is increasingly used for pedagogical purposes in preschools, that also means that preschools have expanded their opportunities to work with children’s literacy development. For preschool teachers, it is important to discuss how literacy development can be supported in a contemporary media landscape.     

Assessing self-assessment: can age and prior literacy attainment predict the accuracy of children’s self-assessments in literacy?

Self-assessment practices have been advocated in recent Irish educational documents due to their potential to enhance school children’s learning and self-regulatory skills. However, the literature has highlighted how some children struggle to make accurate self-assessments of their academic work, which diminishes such positive effects (Keane and Griffin 2015; Nicol 2009). Using Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development (1970) as a theoretical framework, the present study sought to investigate whether children’s academic self-assessments became more accurate in line with increased age and higher prior literacy attainment. Following training in the use of self-assessment writing rubrics, 85 school children from second class, fifth class and Transition Year wrote an English essay and later self-assessed their work using rubrics devised by Andrade, Du, and Wang (2008). Results indicated that overall, children’s self-assessment scores held a weak relationship with their actual performance scores (r?=?.24). However, findings illustrated that children’s self-assessments became significantly more accurate in line with increased developmental stages. Strong correlations also emerged between higher prior literacy attainment and children’s accuracy in self-assessments, amongst second class (r?=??.45) and fifth class (r?=??.73) children only. The findings suggest that Irish school children, in particular, primary school children with low literacy attainment, display difficulty making accurate self-assessments of their academic work in literacy. Stemming from the research, implications for practice and future research directions are outlined.     

Individual differences in children’s literacy development: the contribution of orthographic knowledge

Orthographic knowledge is one of several contributors to developing literacy skills. However, our understanding of how orthographic knowledge contributes to both spelling and reading is incomplete due to a lack of consistency in defining and measuring orthographic knowledge. The goal of the present study was to empirically test whether or not orthographic knowledge could be construed as a multi-dimensional construct that contributes to reading and spelling skill in school-aged children. Using regression analyses, the current study supports the conceptualization of orthographic knowledge as a multi-dimensional construct, consisting of both word specific and general orthographic knowledge. For school-aged children, both types of orthographic knowledge make separate and unique contributions to both reading and spelling, over and above the contributions of phonological skills. Results illustrate the importance of orthographic knowledge to developing literacy skills.     

Learning from Ninjas: young people’s films as a lens for an expanded view of literacy and language

ABSTRACT

This article examines young people’s films to provide insights about language and literacy practices. It offers a heuristic for thinking about how to approach data that is collectively produced. It tries to make sense of new ways of knowing that locate the research in the field rather than in the academic domain. The authors develop a lens for looking at films made by young people that acknowledge multiple modes and materiality within their meaning-making practices. We make an argument about the cultural politics of research, to consider how the language and literacy practices of young people are positioned. We argue for more consideration of how language and literacy appear entangled within objects and other stuff within young people’s media productions, so as to trouble disciplinary boundaries within and beyond literacy and language studies.     

Primary teachers’ understanding of the interactive whiteboard as a tool for children’s collaborative learning and knowledge‐building

This paper reports on the second phase of a joint teacher/researcher project that explored teachers’ understandings of the potential of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) as a tool for primary school children’s collaborative group work. By examining teachers’ written analyses and discussions of work carried out in their own classrooms, the paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the ways in which the use of IWBs can contribute to changes in pedagogy. It highlights the interrelationships between collaborative learning and factors identified as important in the research carried out by teachers, amongst them the children’s technical skills and confidence, the mediating role of the teacher, the IWB affordances for knowledge‐building and the teachers’ own knowledge, attitudes and professional development. The paper also provides an account of how participation by the teachers in a course with Faculty staff, focused on the collaborative co‐construction of knowledge related to learning and to classroom research grounded in the values and principles of socio‐cultural theory, supported changes in pedagogic practice.     

Paying the price: consequences for children’s education in prison in a market society

This article explores consequences for children’s education in custodial institutions in a contemporary market society, England and Wales. It finds that policy decision-making designed to ‘transform’ prison education for children is primarily influenced by a desire to limit the cost to the public purse of custodial placements. This paper argues that market values influence decision-making in the youth custody sector and shape the nature and quality of provision that children are permitted to access. The consequences associated with this include further fragmentation of prison provision for children, an imbalance in the types of custodial place made available, (with children disproportionately contained in the cheapest type of provision), geographical discrepancies and persistent high re-offending rates. The concern with the costs of custody is particularly prominent in a society subject to ‘austerity’ measures across a wide range of public services, particularly in the criminal justice sector (Ismail, 2020). However, it is inconsistent with contemporary knowledge and understanding of children in custody, their needs and their vulnerabilities. The transformation supposedly sought is unlikely to materialize while annual cost-per-child place is a dominant driving force. Instead, we need to start with an understanding of what individual support children in prison need in order to be ‘education ready’.     

Promising effects of an intervention: Young children’s literacy gains and changes in their home literacy activities from a bilingual family literacy program in Canada

The goal of this paper was to examine promising effects of a bilingual family literacy program: to track the changes of families’ literacy activities through a bilingual family literacy intervention, and to examine the children literacy gains in both Chinese and English across socioeconomic sub-groups. The intervention was an eight-week, two hours per week, literacy program in three Chinese communities in Toronto. Parents, with their children, participated in the program. The extremely high attendance rate provided evidence that families enjoyed the family literacy intervention and felt that the sessions were worthwhile. For their families’ literacy activities, the three sites followed the same trend: reaching the peak of activity at week four, slightly dropping down at weeks five and six, and then increasing to a second peak at week seven or week eight. Results also showed that across the three groups, children of mothers with lower education levels made fewer gains in their English expressive vocabularies and their Chinese expressive vocabularies, than children whose mothers had a higher level of education.     

Health literacy and social capital: what role for adult literacy partnerships and pedagogy?

This paper makes the case for adult literacy (including numeracy) practitioners to play a greater role in health literacy initiatives in Australia. The paper draws on data from a national research project that investigated adult literacy partnerships and pedagogy viewed from a social capital perspective. The primary purpose of the project was to produce guidelines on how to deliver integrated adult literacy and numeracy programmes using a social capital approach. Prior experience of partnerships was explored through a review of the literature and an environmental scan of adult literacy providers using an email survey and follow-up interviews. An in-depth case study of a health literacy partnership was trialled using action research. Partnerships between adult literacy and health organisations in Australia were found to be largely ad hoc and rarely documented. To enable sustainable health literacy programmes, partnerships are needed across the three interlinked organisational levels – micro, meso and macro, and in particular the latter, which is currently almost completely absent. The conceptual frameworks outlined for health literacy partnerships and social capital pedagogy in this paper are new and potentially of value to policy makers, researchers and practitioners in the fields of health and literacy.     

Exploring a refined model of home literacy activities and associations with children’s emergent literacy skills

Reading and Writing - Based on the Home Literacy Model, this study explored a refined model of home literacy activities and their relations with children’s emergent literacy skills in a...     

When all the school became a stage: young children enacting a community’s fear and sense of loss

This article gives an ethnographic glimpse of how an urban South African school mirrored a community’s sense‐making during times of rapid social change. The glimpse is extracted largely from an ethnography that was composed in 2000. In this study of school life, the biennial play was central to the year’s activities. In the play the tone, content and style reflected a performance of the discourse of the school community – a discourse of fear and despondency, while searching for hope in spiritual song. Today this previously all White, Afrikaner school is still predominantly White, as Black children’s parents prefer English‐medium schools. On the surface the school appears to be a safe haven for those who were fearful of losing their social position, their language and their way of living, but the initial breakdown of the fabric of the school does not seem to have healed during the time after the study had been completed.     

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.     

Participatory pedagogy for empowerment: a critical discourse analysis of teacher–parents’ interactions in a family literacy course in London

This paper revisits and discusses some of Paulo Freire’s theoretical tenets for participatory education suggested as part of a critical approach to the education of adults. Through data collected during a family literacy programme, the author analyses her discursive interactions as an adult education tutor with parents as learners. These discourse practices are analysed using critical discourse analysis and are discussed against Freire’s principles for participatory pedagogy. The author’s decision to insert the analysis and discussion of her classroom practices within these theoretical frameworks lies on their focus on language and their alleged commitment to the transformation of discursive practices that reinforce unequal power relations in society. The findings of the study indicate the presence of authoritarian discourse that does little to change the power relations within the classroom. The author posits that despite managing to give rise to a discussion of themes related to parents’ advocacy and language awareness in their interactions within their children’s school, a deeper realisation and discussion of these issues was hindered by her failure to challenge the order of discourses present in her interactions with parents. The author concludes by suggesting that there is a need for teachers to closely re‐evaluate the features of their own discourse practices if immigrant parents attending family literacy courses are to be given a voice within the classroom as a first step towards raising their prospects of advocacy and empowerment in wider social contexts.     

Nation building and war narratives for children: war and militarism in Hebrew 1940s and 1950s children’s literature

This paper examines militarisation in child culture in Israel’s transition from a pre-state society engaged in the nation-building process to statehood. The paper studies children’s culture and the literary corpus for children created in the 1940s and 1950s in Jewish Palestine, before and after Israel’s establishment. It investigates the main stages in the rapid development of the militaristic narrative for children – from the beginning of World War II in 1939, through the War of Independence in 1948, and during the first decade of statehood. By examining the nature of the national-military children’s story, I demonstrate the extent to which militarisation in Israeli children’s culture was dictated from above. I also argue that society’s rapid change following the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 brought about a dramatic shift in the attitude of state institutions, and especially the education system, towards the militaristic narrative addressed towards children that was vigorously promoted prior to 1948.     

A remaking pedagogy: adaptation and archetypes in the child’s multimodal reading and writing

This paper proposes combining theories about, and practices of, using archetypes and adaptation in education for the purposes of multimodal literacy learning. Within such contexts, children of primary school age act as readers, performers and researchers, exploring and analysing existing adaptations of archetypal stories and images across time, space and platforms, as well as writers constructing and producing their own adaptations of archetypes in varying forms. Our suggestions are that ‘revisiting’ and ‘remaking’ existing texts and practices in the multimodal primary classroom can be a route to a deeper and more sophisticated learning experience, and one which challenges current definitions of reading, writing and literacy.     

Group size and organisational conditions for children’s learning in preschool: a teacher perspective

Background:?There is a limited amount of research about group size in preschool, and how it impacts on teachers’ working conditions and their ability to support children’s learning and knowledge development in line with curriculum intentions.

Purpose:?From a perspective on quality, this article examines the organisational conditions for children’s learning in preschool in relation to group size. The questions at issue are: how do teachers explain how they organise the child group and the learning environment in preschool, and why?

Sample:?The sample consists of 12 preschools from different parts of Sweden. The preschools selected for the study are stratified in order to represent small and large group sizes in Swedish preschools as defined by the Swedish National Agency for Education. The sample contains both urban and rural regions and represents districts that differ geographically, demographically, ethnically, and which include varied socioeconomic structures. The 12 preschools had children in three age groupings: 1–3, 3–5 or 1–5. The number of children in the participating preschools ranged from 12 children to 45 children, with seven of the preschools having more than 30 children in their groups.

Design and method:?The article is based on interactionist perspectives, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, a critical ecology of the early childhood profession, theories of children’s learning, and four dimensions of pedagogical quality. Together, these theoretical perspectives contribute to an understanding of the relationships between policy issues, educational goals, group size and teachers’ competence in organising and creating conditions for children’s learning. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two teachers from each of the 12 preschools. The interviews lasted between 40–60 minutes and were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The analytical process was conducted in three steps and can be described as an analytical process of abduction. The four dimensions of pedagogical quality were used as analytical lenses to discern and understand critical aspects related to the teachers’ understanding of group size.

Result: Irrespective of group size, most of the children participate in different group constellations throughout the day, some organised by the teachers and some by the children themselves. Teachers’ competence to organise the children in such ways that good conditions for learning were created, differed between preschools, and depended on the teachers’ approach, which can be described as either intentional or unintentional learning.

Conclusion: Teachers’ organisational approaches influence the quality of the preschool and conditions for children’s learning in distinct ways.